In November 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev addressed the Central Committee plenum to vent his frustration over the glaring distortions created by the state’s central economic planning. His chief complaint concerned a metric known as val—gross industrial output measured by weight or volume. Lighting factories faced production quotas based on sheer tonnage, rather than quality or consumer demand. Their response was rational, if disastrous.
“The chandeliers grew heavier and heavier until they started pulling ceilings down,” Khrushchev noted. “The workers fulfilled the plan… but who needs this plan? To whom does it give light?”
As economists have since pointed out, this illustrates Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Central planning rewards producers for hitting numerical targets, even when doing so wastes resources and destroys economic value.
Decades later, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) appears to have adopted the Soviet lighting industry’s approach. Under pressure from executive mandates to deliver a high volume of deregulation, the FRA recently touted a record of 65 deregulatory actions finalized between January 2025 and late 2026.
On paper, that’s a staggering amount of regulatory relief. In practice, the FRA has simply manufactured heavy, low-value chandeliers.
The Great Deregulatory Paper Shuffle
Look past the gross output metric—the agency’s claimed 65 actions—and the record looks vastly larger than the practical relief delivered to the American rail network. A close review of these rules reveals an agency aggressively padding the administrative ledger to meet a quota, largely blind to the need for productive economic outcomes.
Consider the “July 1 Dump.” On July 1, 2025, the FRA published a flurry of final rules. Of its 65 claimed deregulatory actions, a staggering 35 were purely administrative updates finalized on or around that day. What did these sweeping deregulatory reforms accomplish? They changed physical addresses, updated web links, and clarified internal definitions.
For example, the agency issued separate final rules making “administrative updates” to the Railroad Workplace Safety Regulations (49 C.F.R. Part 214), the Special Notice and Emergency Order Procedures (49 C.F.R. Part 216), the Railroad Freight Car Safety Standards (49 C.F.R. Part 215), and the Control of Alcohol and Drug Use Regulations (49 C.F.R. Part 219), among many others.
The regulatory impact analysis—an assessment of a rule’s economic effects—for nearly all these actions relies on identical boilerplate text. Each notes that the rule “imparts no additional burdens on regulated entities” because it merely replaces references to specific penalty amounts with generic references to the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), or updates an email address.
Updating agency routing codes and proofreading the CFR are basic housekeeping tasks of the administrative state. Rebranding them as substantive deregulatory actions is a masterclass in performative compliance. The FRA claims credit for shrinking the regulatory burden without actually liberalizing the prescriptive command-and-control frameworks—the detailed mandates that dictate how railroads operate—that govern the industry.
Three Rules and Some Spare Change
The absence of real economic impact in the FRA’s recent output is stark. For approximately 95% of its 65 actions, the agency quantifies no economic savings, relying instead on qualitative claims about “improving readability” or “clarifying language.” That leaves exactly three rules for which the FRA quantified regulatory savings. Even here, the estimates show narrow, limited relief.
- Emergency Escape Breathing Apparatus (EEBA) Standards (Aug. 7, 2025): This rule projects between $2.7 million and $7.7 million in savings over 10 years. But those savings don’t stem from eliminating an unjustified or redundant requirement. They come entirely from extending a 2024 rule’s compliance dates by one year. The rule simply postpones compliance costs rather than delivering structural reform.
- Reflectorization of Rail Freight Rolling Stock (Jan. 27, 2026): This rule, which amends 49 C.F.R. Part 224, boasts the largest quantified savings: an estimated $91 million over 20 years, or about $8.6 million on an annualized basis. But this figure doesn’t reflect a comparable change in actual railroad practices. For more than a decade, the industry had operated under a waiver allowing it to depart from these requirements for reflective markings on freight cars. Making that longstanding waiver permanent is certainly good administrative practice: It saves the government and industry the modest time needed to renew the paperwork periodically. But it delivers almost no additional reduction in railroads’ operating costs, since they already enjoyed the operational relief.
- Training, Qualification, and Oversight for Safety-Related Railroad Employees (May 15, 2026): This final rule, which amends 49 C.F.R. Part 243, yields an estimated $1.1 million in cost savings. Yet that relief comes solely from a one-year reprieve from annual refresher-training requirements, granted exclusively to small entities. It offers no estimated relief for Class I railroads—the largest railroads and the primary drivers of national freight volume.
Meet the New Rules. Same as the Old Waivers.
The remaining actions in the FRA’s portfolio follow a similar pattern of marginal tweaks masquerading as significant liberalization. Another batch of rules finalized throughout 2026 largely focuses on codifying existing waivers and eliminating redundant paperwork.
For instance, the April 2026 rule amending qualification and certification requirements for locomotive engineers and conductors (49 C.F.R. Parts 240 and 242) simply codifies longstanding waivers for railroads participating in the Confidential Close Call Reporting System (C3RS), a program for confidentially reporting safety incidents and near misses.
Another April 2026 rule revises the definition of a non-traversable curb—a barrier designed to prevent drivers from going around lowered crossing gates—in quiet zones, where trains generally don’t sound their horns (49 C.F.R. Part 222). Again, it codifies five preexisting waivers. In August 2026, the FRA permitted 3D computer-based simulations for periodic refresher training on brake systems (49 C.F.R. Part 232)—a sensible modernization, but one the agency already allowed through waivers.
Codifying waivers is a legitimate and necessary function of administrative agencies. It frees up time and resources otherwise spent drafting, submitting, and reviewing repetitive waiver requests. It also saves agency lawyers time and provides regulatory certainty.
But when an agency’s deregulatory agenda consists almost entirely of administrative updates and codifying existing practices, it signals that the agency has deprioritized the hard work of structural reform.
Time to Lighten the Load
The FRA has met its deregulatory quota. It has delivered 65 actions, dutifully checking the current administration’s boxes. In doing so, it has produced the regulatory equivalent of a Soviet chandelier: a heavy volume of paperwork that looks impressive on a centralized ledger but sheds little light on the industry it regulates.
Clerical updates dominate the FRA’s action count, while the few quantified savings are narrow, temporary, or largely already realized in practice. This isn’t evidence of broad, measurable deregulation. It’s evidence of an agency gaming an arbitrary metric.
Real deregulation requires agencies to tackle the substantive bottlenecks that suppress competitiveness, capital investment, and operational efficiency. It requires shifting from rigid, technology-blocking crew-size mandates and prescriptive inspection rules to performance-based standards that set safety goals while allowing railroads to choose how to meet them. Those standards could accommodate modern technology, such as autonomous track inspection systems that check tracks without an onboard inspector.
It also requires streamlining review timelines under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that stall critical freight infrastructure, including facilities where cargo moves between trains and trucks.
The FRA needs to judge regulatory relief by what it delivers, not the gross tonnage of its rulemakings. The rail industry needs lighter burdens, not heavier chandeliers.
