President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders Wednesday afternoon with the goal of creating more transparency in the process of creating and promulgating federal regulations.

"Today, we take bold, new action to protect Americans from out-of-control bureaucracy and stop regulators from imposing secret rules and hidden penalties on the American people," Trump said at the Wednesday afternoon signing at the White House.

One of the two executive orders bars federal agencies from skipping the cost-benefit analysis and avoiding public comment when issuing legally binding requirements related to laws and regulations and requires that "guidance documents" be treated as "non-binding both in law and in practice."

"For many decades, federal agencies have been issuing thousands of pages of so-called 'guidance' documents — a pernicious kind of regulation imposed by unaccountable bureaucrats in the form of commentary on how rules should be interpreted," the president continued. "Because of these materials and the fact that these materials are too often hidden and hard to find, many Americans learn of the rules only when federal agents come knocking on the door."

"Guidance documents" can take the form of blog posts, letters, brochures, and other forms of communications that aren't proper federal regulations and don't go through the public process for them.

The president added that a regulatory system like this "gravely undermines our constitutional system of government" and that "a permanent federal bureaucracy cannot become a fourth branch of government, unanswerable to American voters."

The second executive order aims to protect people from secretive interpretations of existing regulations and unexpected penalties by requiring that no person should be subjected to regulatory enforcement "absent prior public notice of both the enforcing agency’s jurisdiction over particular conduct and the legal standards applicable to that conduct."

Present at the signing event was Andy Johnson, a Wyoming rancher who, during the Obama administration, was surprised with $16 million in fines from the Environmental Protection Agency for trying to build a pond on his own property. The Obama administration eventually settled after the story and the resulting court case gained national attention.

"About five years ago, when I applied for a stock pond permit for my private property, I had no idea that the EPA would come knocking at my door and threaten me and my family — civilly, criminally, and a fine of $37,500 per day," Johnson said at the ceremony. "We won our case, but unlike a lot of other middle class Americans, that’s not the case. ... The litigation was way, way too expensive."

In a statement to Blaze Media, acting Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought said that Wednesday's orders "give this Administration the tools to defend Americans’ freedom and liberty against off-the-book regulations and prevent unfair penalties from being levied on American families and businesses by rogue agencies.”

The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s daily Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

The Trump administration is set to announce a final repeal of the Obama administration’s “Waters of the United States” rule on Thursday. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler made the announcement via an op-ed in the Des Moines Register Thursday morning.

The Obama-era regulation, put forward in 2015, drastically expanded which waterways are subject to federal control under the Clean Water Act to include man-made ditches and streams on private property that only have water in them following rain or snowmelt. It was swamped with litigation from the start. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration’s rule violated federal law and sent it back to the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to be reworked.

Wheeler’s op-ed explains that the 2015 rule was “was so far-reaching that they needed to clarify in regulatory text that puddles were excluded.” This created a regulatory headache for farmers, land developers, and anyone confused about whether or not they now needed a federal permit to work on their own land.

President Trump vowed to kill the rule on the campaign trail, and in 2017, he directed the EPA to work on the “elimination of this very destructive and horrible rule.” A proposed rule introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency back in December would relax the definition of what counts as waters that can be regulated. Republican senators tried to pass an amendment repealing the 2015 rule last year, but it failed.

Wheeler wrote that the “new, more precise definition would mean that farmers, land owners, and businesses will spend less time and money determining whether they need a federal permit and more time upgrading aging infrastructure, building homes, creating jobs, and growing crops to feed our families.”

Update: After publication of this story, Blaze Media received the following statement from Russ Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget:

This continues our effort to remove regulations that put absurd government standards on the American people. For years, this rule has been used by government agencies to punish farmers and private land owners with out-of-control fines and imprisonment for simply working to protect or better their property. This is another promise kept for our farmers and ranchers as President Trump continues to remove crushing regulations from the American people.

Light bulbs that were set to be outlawed under an Obama-era regulation will stay on store shelves thanks to regulation rollback from the Trump administration.

Multiple outlets reported Wednesday that the Department of Energy had finalized a new rule striking a last-minute Obama regulation that outlawed certain kinds of light bulbs such as three-way bulbs, decorative bulbs, and "rough service lamps."

“This regulation gives consumers more choices, and consumers are better off with more choices,” a Trump DOE official explained to The Hill.

One of the reasons that the Obama administration offered for the regulation was that people might purchase the these light sources instead of "other regulated lamp types" like LED or compact fluorescent bulbs. The Obama administration's 2017 regulation was set to take effect in 2020.

Critics say that the Trump administration's latest move will end up costing consumers more because the less regulated bulbs use more electricity.

"The rollback will lead to higher energy bills for homes and businesses, plus significantly more pollution harming our health and the environment due to all the extra electricity that will need to be generated," the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a Wednesday statement. "Efficiency standards would ensure that every bulb purchased in the future is an efficient one. "

“Wasting energy with inefficient lightbulbs isn’t just costly for homes and businesses, it’s terrible for our climate," reads a statement from Alliance to Save Energy president Jason Hartke. "This rule means we’re going to need the electricity produced by 25 coal power plants just to power wasteful bulbs.

Nobody, however, will be forcing consumers to purchase and use less efficient light bulbs under the new rule, which is what the Trump Department of Energy said in the regulation.

"This rule does not prevent consumers from buying the lamps they desire, including efficient options," the department. The department added that "the market is successfully transitioning to LEDs regardless of government regulation. Consumers are clearly taking advantage of the energy savings provided by LEDs."

The regulations are an implementation mechanism for part of a 2007 energy law that addresses efficiency standards for light bulbs and was meant to phase out less efficient bulbs over time. The first wave of regulations from 2007 statute led to several unintended consequences such as plant closings and spurred on failed attempts to repeal it.

The Trump administration announced plans to roll back an Obamacare non-discrimination regulation that redefined discrimination "on the basis of sex" to include both gender identity and the termination of pregnancy, i.e. abortion.

In a Friday morning press call, Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino at the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters that the agency would move forward on reform of a rule enforcing section 1557 of Obamacare. The current regulation in question was issued during the waning months of the Obama administration in 2016, but blocked by federal judges before it could take effect.

"Plaintiffs will be forced to either violate their religious beliefs or maintain their current policies, which seem to be in direct conflict with the rule and risk the severe consequences of enforcement," federal Judge Reed O'Connor wrote at the time.

To date, Severino explained Friday, the department during the previous and current administrations has been enjoined from enacting the Obama-era rule and now plans to replace it, bringing the department's official enforcement mechanisms back in line with the original intent of the legislation passed by Congress.

“When Congress prohibited sex discrimination, it did so according to the plain meaning of the term, and we are making our regulations conform,” Severino explained in a statement.

“The American people want vigorous protection of civil rights and faithfulness to the text of the laws passed by their representatives,” the statement continues. “The proposed rule would accomplish both goals.”

The administration also claims that the announced rule change would come with the added benefit of saving the American taxpayer over $3 billion per year in regulatory compliance costs alone. An HHS fact sheet explains that the costs come from a part of the 2016 regulation that requires that "every significant publication in healthcare larger than a postcard sent to a member of the public" has to include a notice of non-discrimination and another notice translated into at least 15 different foreign languages.

The added postage and paper cost for those notices adds up, Severino says, but the notices have proven ineffective at their intended purpose of ensuring that people who speak other languages are more informed about health care policy.

“As a child of Hispanic immigrants, I know how vitally important it is that people receive quality healthcare services regardless of the language they speak, and this proposal grants providers the needed flexibility for achieving that goal,” Severino's statement says, adding, “The American people are tired of unnecessary regulations getting in the way of access to affordable healthcare."

Elsewhere in the administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development also announced a rule change that would eliminate an Obama-era regulation transgender mandate requiring HUD homeless shelters to accommodate people based on gender identity rather than sex.

Democratic efforts to redefine sex discrimination to include gender identity and abortion protections didn't end with the Obama administration; they've simply moved their fight from the executive branch to the legislative.

The Democrat-controlled House recently passed the "Equality Act," which seeks to rewrite the definition of sex discrimination in federal civil rights law; it would also create a "a universal right to abortion, up until birth,” according to one Republican congresswoman.

2018 is now officially in the books. On the regulatory front, supporters of President Donald Trump and small government have something to celebrate, but there’s still a long fight yet ahead.

The Ten Thousand Commandments, the “Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State” from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), is out, and it notes that the number of federal regulations handed down under Trump has reached record lows since records began to be kept in the 1970s, with a total of 3,367 for the year. Obama’s lowest count ever was 3,410. Additionally, the administration has cut down on bureaucratic regulations at a rate of four slashed for every one issued.

In fact, the report notes, the only president to have a better deregulatory year than President Trump in 2018 was President Trump in 2017, with a record low of 3,281 issued regulations and a rate of 22 cut for one issued.

“At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump’s regulatory reform project going? Better than Obama, Bush II, and Clinton in terms of fewer regulations; but not as good as Trump’s own first year,” reads a blog post from CEI vice president for policy and senior fellow Clyde Crews.

President Trump has made a concerted effort to cut down on the size and power of the federal bureaucracy, including an executive order sent out during his first 100 days in office that required two regulations to be rescinded for every one new one.

However, there is still work to be done for those who would rather see the bulk of federal policy-making coming from the legislative branch instead of executive bureaucrats. The post from CEI also notes that, even at this record low level, the administrative state still handed down 12 regulations for every law that Congress passed.

“Even in an administration attempting to cut regulation, the number of rules from hundreds of federal agencies (nobody really knows exactly how many) will vastly outstrip the number of laws that Congress passes,” notes another CEI blog post about the index. “That represents the triumph of the Administrative State over the Constitution, and this it even holds under President Trump.”

And Crews also notes that things don’t look much better for federal deregulation with Democrats in charge of the House in the 116th Congress. He writes that “Trump’s next move should be an executive order on regulatory streamlining, with specific emphasis on agency guidance documents, that, while they are not formal regulations, nonetheless can have regulatory effect on the public.”