Trump’s Housing Red Tape Executive Order Is a Great Idea—Now Make It the Template to Gut Government Interference Everywhere and Shame the States Into Fixing Their Own Messes

I have regularly praised President Trump on his policies and actions that have reduced taxes and regulation. This includes the strong deregulatory efforts already underway at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where new leadership has frozen Biden-era rules and rolled back burdensome disclosure requirements, at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Administrator Lee Zeldin, which has launched the largest deregulatory push in decades, and at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). His recent Executive Order 14394 is a powerful, smart, overdue strike against the federal government’s abusive permitting delays and pointless environmental reviews that have artificially inflated housing costs for American families. It is now also important that this order serves as a ready-made template to slash similar regulatory interference in other industries while pressuring states and localities to clean up their even worse messes.

Signed on March 13, 2026, and titled “Removing Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Home Construction,” the order directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Secretary of the Army to streamline stormwater, wetlands, and Clean Water Act permitting rules that now tack on months or years of delays and tens of thousands of dollars in costs. It orders the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to expand categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) for housing projects and related infrastructure. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) must publish best practices for states and cities — things like capped permit timelines, lower fees, by-right development, and fewer mandates on manufactured and modular homes — while offering federal incentives to governments that actually adopt them.

This move is long overdue because federal red tape is a major reason new homes are so expensive. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates that regulations now add roughly 24 percent — about $94,000 — to the price of an average single-family home, with permitting delays averaging seven months or longer. The same NEPA and Clean Water Act bottlenecks have crippled energy projects, infrastructure upgrades, and manufacturing facilities for decades. I have long argued, along with the Cato Institute, that these rules hand unelected bureaucrats and activist groups a veto over private development with zero accountability. Ronald Reagan showed in the 1980s that slashing regulatory burdens unleashes real economic growth — by deregulating airlines and trucking, which slashed prices, boosted competition, and created millions of new jobs; this order simply applies that same proven logic to one of the biggest markets Americans care about.

I strongly support expanding this approach beyond housing because the same government interference strangles growth in energy, small business, and manufacturing too. Even more important, HUD’s best-practices list gives states and cities a ready-made playbook to fix their own zoning, building codes, and local permitting disasters that are often far worse than Washington’s. If governors and mayors — especially in high-cost blue states that cling to restrictions that block new homes near existing neighborhoods and “green” mandates — refuse to copy the model, they will look ridiculous when housing stays unaffordable on their watch. This order can also turbo-charge the growing YIMBY housing movement that says yes to new development in their own backyards, finally increasing supply instead of endlessly restricting it. This order does not rewrite statutes or claim new executive power; it simply tells agencies to use the authority they already have to cut unnecessary burdens. Congress should codify these reforms, and every governor and mayor who claims to care about affordable housing should follow suit immediately — before another generation gets locked out of the American Dream.