In its first year, the Trump Administration has moved across many fronts to “deconstruct the administrative state,” in the words of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. These efforts have ranged from encouraging Congress to block the implementation of regulatory rules adopted in the last few months of the Obama Administration, to appointing vehement opponents of stringent governmental regulations to head federal agencies, such as Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, to requiring the repeal of two regulations for every new one adopted through an Executive Order, to proposing deep budget cuts in arenas of regulatory enforcement.

This late-breaking roundtable would place these developments in historical context. It would pose such questions as:

• What explains why regulatory endeavors have accumulated so broadly over the last century or so, especially in the United States, but elsewhere as well

• What has driven the waxing discontent with the regulatory state (among whom, exactly, and on what basis)

• How globalization has reshaped regulatory politics

• How best to understand the origins of the emerging, widespread populist distrust of technocracy (distrust that far extends beyond those large corporations that want a reduction in regulatory burden)

• How to make sense of the disconnect between strong popular support for many specific regulatory objectives and much weaker popular support for technocratic governance in general

• How best to understand the processes underway at federal agencies, including countercurrents to the wider deregulatory impulse

The panel will include a few historians, ideally two former regulators (a Democrat and a Republican), and one scholar from political science/law.