While signing the order, Donald Trump said publicly, “If you have a regulation you want—number one—we’re not going to approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms.” The President signed in the presence of Vice President Mike Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and several small business leaders.
Many of these small business leaders are optimistic about the new executive order, and some like Adam Robinson, founder of Hireology, express frustration over how difficult it was for his business to thrive under the Obama Administration. Though Hireology did quadruple its workforce, he says about the Department of Labor moving the threshold that makes non-exempt employees eligible for overtime, “I told [the House Small Business Committee] that if this overtime regulation had been in place, I literally could not have hired my first employee.”
Some deregulation at the federal level can be very effective in easing the financial burdens of small businesses, but a lot of the regulations that bind them are governed at state and local levels. Karen Mills, senior fellow at Harvard Business School and former head of U.S. Small Business Administration, told CNBC that federal deregulation does not ease that burden, and she cautions that “Just saying things like for every new regulation that gets put in place, two must be eliminated, doesn’t do the trick. It’s more complicated than that.”
