During his first term, Donald Trump pledged to kill two federal regulations for each new one imposed. In the spirit of the president’s hyperbolic manner, he now proposes during his second term to eliminate 10 federal rules for each new regulation.

“Already, preparations are underway to slash massive numbers of job-killing regulations — eliminating 10 old regulations for every new one,” Trump said Monday. “You put a new regulation on, you have to get rid of 10.”

This is overly ambitious, perhaps. But the commitment from the White House to take a hacksaw to the administrative state as a means of boosting growth and efficiency — even beyond Elon Musk’s cost-cutting panel — is a welcome development after four years of Joe Biden succoring a sprawling and meddlesome bureaucracy.

Critics argue that Trump’s attacks on federal red tape are for show. Data compiled by researchers from Yale, Penn and Rutgers, for instance, found that, rather than killing two rules for one added, the first Trump administration actually increased regulations, reported Government Executive, which covers the federal government.

But even proponents of a robust administrative apparatus concede that Trump’s anti-regulation stance has borne fruit. “The ‘two for one’ served less to eliminate regulations than it slowed down the pace of new regulations,” Susan Dudley, former director of George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, told Government Executive. “So when agencies had to find offsets, they were more likely to pause and think about whether regulation was necessary.”

Indeed, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports that the number of pages in the Federal Register — the repository for federal rules and regulations — hit an all-time high at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. A year later under Trump, that number fell 36 percent.

The size of the Federal Register proceeded to climb during the next three years, but the institute notes that this could be the result of the fact that even deregulatory efforts require action by federal agencies.

Yes, many federal rules are necessary to protect public health and safety. But the massive expansion of the regulatory state in recent decades symbolizes a metastasizing federal behemoth intent on meddling in every aspect of American life, no matter how trivial.

Recent Supreme Court rulings have limited the ability of executive branch agencies to liberally interpret federal law to enhance their own power, and that’s a welcome development. Trump’s efforts to tear down unnecessary barriers to unleash the entrepreneurial forces that have made this nation the most prosperous on Earth are also welcome, even if reaching the “10 for one” goal will be unlikely.

Better to aim high and miss than to aim low and hit.

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