EXCLUSIVE – The largest manufacturing association in the United States has sent 10 federal agencies a series of policy recommendations, with the goal of highlighting for the Trump administration “dozens of burdensome and outdated regulations that are driving up costs and undermining manufacturing competitiveness.”
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) said that U.S. manufacturers are spending $350 billion annually just to comply with federal regulations alone.
The group, which supports 13 million people who make things in America, said it was helping answer the call of President Donald Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order outlining the Department of Government Efficiency’s “de-regulatory initiative.” Trump instructed agency heads to conduct a top-to-bottom review within 60 days to identify regulations that burden small businesses, impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship, and “harm the national interest” by significantly impeding “technological innovation, infrastructure development, disaster response, inflation reduction, research and development, economic development, energy production, land use, and foreign policy objectives.”
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NAM identified 44 regulations across the 10 agencies that the manufacturers group said Trump should consider revising or rescinding.
Fox News Digital exclusively obtained copies of letters detailing necessary changes sent to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, the Department of Labor, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the Department of Commerce, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Treasury.
The effort is part of recommendations to Congress and the administration “to implement a comprehensive manufacturing strategy that includes making the 2017 tax reforms permanent and expediting permitting reform to unleash American energy,” according to the manufacturing association.
Fox News Digital also obtained a copy of a letter NAM is sending to Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought summarizing its findings. It states that manufacturers collectively contribute $2.93 trillion to the U.S. economy, “and right-sized, commonsense regulations are critical to sustaining the manufacturing strength that underpins our nation’s prosperity.”
“In other words: when manufacturing wins, America wins,” the letter says.
“Rebalancing regulations is a critical pillar of our comprehensive manufacturing strategy— which also includes making the 2017 tax reforms permanent, expediting permitting reform to unleash American energy, strengthening the manufacturing workforce and implementing commonsense trade policies,” NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons said in a statement. “Manufacturers are spending $350 billion each year just to comply with federal regulations – money that could be spent on expanding factories and production lines, hiring new workers or raising wages.”
“The administration is already answering the calls of manufacturers across the country to reconsider and rebalance regulations that are holding manufacturers back,” Timmons added. “Using these recommendations as a guidepost, manufacturers look forward to continuing to work with the administration to fix rules that cost too much, trap projects in red tape, chill investment, do not make sense and harm the 13 million men and women who make things in the United States.”
The group identified several Biden-era policies it attributes to driving up compliance costs.
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In its letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, NAM said the outgoing Biden administration in December 2024 “finalized a multi-volume study updating the DOE’s understanding of the potential effects of U.S. liquefied natural gas exports,” and those updated studies “included misleading and incomplete conclusions based on flawed and missing data.”
NAM Managing Vice President of Policy Charles Crain urged the Department of Energy to reissue “new, accurate studies that reflect the true economic impact of LNG exports with a determination that LNG exports are in the public interest.” Crain said U.S. manufacturers “have been leading the global competition to build the necessary infrastructure to expand the production of and export American energy, including LNG.”
“The boom in U.S. natural gas has created tens of thousands of jobs, made the U.S. and its allies more energy secure and less reliant on adversarial nations like Russia, opened up a vital new source to address global energy poverty and helped reduce U.S. emissions by roughly 20% since 2005,” Crain wrote.
One of the recommendations to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was to reverse the ban on offshore oil and gas leasing.
On Jan. 6, 2025, the Biden administration withdrew more than 625 million acres of the Outer Continental Shelf from future oil and natural gas leasing, including the entire U.S. Pacific and Eastern Atlantic coasts, the Eastern Gulf of America, and the remainder of the Northern Bering Sea Climate Resilience Area off the shore of Alaska.
“By limiting access to America’s abundant oil and natural gas resources, this action undermined efforts to secure American energy dominance; if not fully reversed, it could have significant consequences on manufacturers’ access to the energy resources needed to power the U.S. economy,” Crain wrote.
NAM told EPA administrator Lee Zeldin that many of the Biden administration’s “burdensome and unworkable” regulations were issued by the agency he now controls. The manufacturers’ association said the U.S. “does not have to choose between economic development and protecting the environment and public health—we can do both.”
