The Absurdity Of Trump’s ‘2-For-1’ Deregulation Order, Explained

It probably won’t result in bureaucratic chaos—but you should pay attention to a little-known bill that just passed

Feb 2, 2017

February 2, 2017

On Monday, while most of the world was still reeling from the chaos ignited by the travel ban, President Donald Trump signed yet another executive order, this one aimed at handcuffing administrative agencies from issuing new regulations. The order calls for agencies to essentially revoke two regulations for every new one that is implemented. “So if there’s a new regulation, they have to knock out two,” Trump said, following through on a promise Trump made after the election, when he said on YouTube, “I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated.”

[youtube ratio=”0.5625″ position=”standard” ]www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8

Through this “one in, two out” order, Trump wants to make it harder for agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to issue rules that could, for instance, protect public health or mandate levels of energy efficiency in appliances. Likewise for consumer protections, workplace safety, housing discrimination, oversight of big banks, voter rights, and the majority of public protections developed by executive branch agencies, which are typically charged to do so by some law passed by Congress.

[quote position=”right” is_quote=”true”]The president cannot repeal statutes. You’d have to go through Congress.[/quote]

“If you have a regulation you want, number one, we’re not gonna approve it because it’s already been approved probably in 17 different forms,” Trump said. “But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation.

But before you start worrying that that the order puts us on a path to rampant deregulation, where industries and companies are free to do whatever the hell they please with no oversight or restriction, legal experts quickly threw some cold water on the president’s directive, which has been alternately described as “absurd,” “not legitimate,” and “mindless” by public officials and the press.

Jody Freeman, a law professor at Harvard University, called the “2-for-1” policy “arbitrary, not implementable, and a terrible idea,” adding that “the order is vague in many respects,” and that it tasks the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to sort out the details of how it will be implemented. Trump’s lawyers also felt compelled, more than once, to include the condition that it will be implemented “to the extent permitted by law.” Meaning that agency regulations that were developed and issued to satisfy a statute from Congress couldn’t be either blocked or “knocked out.”

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Photo credit: PeopleImages/iStock via Getty Images – What kids are doing on tablets seems to matter more than how long they use them.

Health, Well-being

Screen time guidelines for kids and adolescents have shifted as research paints a more nuanced picture

Quality matters more than the clock.

Good Partner

7/20/2026

Gabriel E. Hales

Concerns surrounding young people’s screen time are widespread.

Australia became the first country to ban social media for users under 16 in December 2025, and Denmark, France and the U.K. have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year.

In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 states have passed laws banning or restricting cellphones in K–12 classrooms; in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued a formal advisory on social media and children’s and adolescents’ mental health; and bestselling books tell parents that smartphones are “rewiring” their children’s brains.

These concerns and policies are part of a quickly changing national and international conversation around how young people spend time on screens and its relationship to their overall health and development. My reading of the mounting research on this issue across disciplines is that the popular narrative blaming screens and smartphones for an adolescent mental health crisis runs well ahead of the current evidence.

I study adolescent digital media use and its influence on social, emotional and academic outcomes. A growing body of research suggests that one-size-fits-all solutions are not the answer and that managing appropriate use of digital media needs to take into account a child’s developmental milestones, how parents and adults around them use media, and the ways kids use it to connect and learn with friends and family.

Screen time: From monolith to multifaceted

Wide adoption of digital media and the internet broadened the range of experiences young people could have online. At the same time, the digital age introduced newfound uncertainties. As with the advent of radio, comic books and arcades, adults worried about how children might interact with or be affected by internet use.

In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics first recommended in 1999 that parents and caregivers keep children under 2 away from screens. In the decades since, professional guidance largely treated children’s media use as a behavior to be mitigated.

Policies introduced by the academy in 2013 and 2016 continued to advise that school-age kids and adolescents – those ages 5 to 18 – be restricted to no more than two hours of “entertainment” screen time a day. The goal was to curb risks associated with heavy media use, among them disrupted sleep, online safety, cyberbullying and physical inactivity.

Originally created for young people’s engagement with stationary media that tend to be confined to one room or context – for example, watching television – these hourly limits became outdated with the integration of smartphones and other digital devices into everyday life. Compared with watching television, online media was far more difficult to track and define, and more nuanced in its use.

Developmentally beneficial activities such as education, socializing and leisure have come to rely on the internet to extend and maintain face-to-face connections. Remote schooling and social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this digitization of daily life.

In my view, adopting strict time limits and restrictions could pose risks to children’s well-being, autonomy and development, for example, by harming adolescent self-esteem.

The latest guidelines

In January 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics retired its decade-old framework that had largely organized its advice around hourly screen limits. The new policy statement on children, adolescents and digital media diverges from this blanket approach. Instead, it suggests parents consider the larger picture in which this media use exists rather than lumping all screen use together.

Similar to the World Health Organization’s 2019 guidance for children under 5, the American Academy of Pediatrics still advises that parents avoid screen media for children younger than 18 months. This recommendation is largely because extended use by children by themselves can be problematic for many young children, crowding out important developmental milestones.

Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics also recommend that when children under 24 months use screens, they should be limited to content and devices that encourage children and caregivers to interact. For ages 2 to 5, screen time – including TV and interactive apps on devices – may be extended to more solo use, provided it’s high-quality digital media designed around learning goals in mathematics and reading. But recreational use should be limited to roughly an hour per day.

For school-age children and teens, the newest guidance has begun to step away from fixed screen time limits and asks families to weigh online activity in the context of everyday life.

Doing so recognizes that a child’s digital experiences are shaped by diverse factors rather than the hours spent online. Current guidelines call on caregivers to distinguish among types of media, from television and social media to video games and interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots. They also call for taking into account a child’s individual characteristics, such as their interests and personality, family members’ own use of screens, and the type of content children are spending time on.

Rethinking screen time

Moving beyond strict screen time limits includes questioning the kind of digital activities kids and adolescents participate in. Do the activities encourage time spent interacting with others online, which can help young people develop important skills and competencies?

Scrolling an algorithm-based, auto-playing video feed likely does not equate to the same opportunities as video-chatting with friends, creating digital art or working with teammates in a multiplayer game. Research suggests these different uses relate to development in different ways and can help kids develop varying skill sets pertaining to everyday life and schooling.

Indeed, a large review of current research found that young people who take part in a range of digital activities, such as browsing the web, online gaming or interacting on social media, show positive associations with social connection, identity exploration, civic participation and learning.

Parental involvement in young children’s screen time has developmental benefits. Cultura Creative/Tetra images via Getty Images

Using these guidelines at home

The current evidence suggests parents and caregivers are best positioned to be digital instructors. Cutting children off altogether can carry its own risks for social and emotional development. Caregiver mediation of children’s screen time can produce widely different outcomes and effects, depending on whether the guidance is supportive or controlling.

Considering your own digital media use is the first step: Are family members engaging in problematic or heavy media use that children in the household might emulate? What applications and uses are most common in the family, and what positive or negative effects might they have, depending on the child’s age? How could these digital activities be safely integrated with other everyday experiences to increase their benefit for children? Conversely, what online time might be better spent on face-to-face experiences?

The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Family Media Plan tool turns these ideas into concrete questions. For example, it recommends working out what each child needs from digital technology, what activities screens might be crowding out, and where their family or household can build in screen-free time. The recommendation is to talk with each child about why they are drawn to particular apps or online activities, what they encounter while browsing, and what might be lost when kids bring phones to gatherings such as mealtimes.

The debate over young people’s screen time is not going away. But the most up-to-date guidelines, and the growing body of research behind them, make a strong case for a more holistic approach. The guidelines treat digital media as a complex, diverse and evolving environment that children need to learn to navigate in the digital age. The risks and rewards depend, as with any developmental setting, on the child, the content and what online time might be crowding out.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Canva – A boy rides an e-scooter, left, while a girl is examined in an emergency room.

Care, Health

ER doctor and mom sets the record straight for parents of kids with e-bikes and e-scooters

At least put on a helmet. And shoes.

Erik Barnes

7/20/2026

An emergency room doctor and fellow mom has been noticing a troubling trend: Many parents are giving their kids something more powerful than bicycles to get around the neighborhood. As a result, she’s seeing more children come into the ER with injuries sustained in e-bike and e-scooter crashes. She recently went online with a plea to parents and young riders.

Dr. Meghan Elizabeth Beach Martin, known online as Dr. Beachgem, posted a video in her scrubs discussing her concerns after seeing so many children come into the hospital with e-bike injuries during the summer months. She’s worried that too many kids and parents don’t understand the proper safety precautions. As a mother herself, she even questions why children are allowed to ride these devices at all.

In the video, the doctor explains that some e-bikes can reach speeds of up to 28 mph. She says that if an e-bike goes any faster than that, it’s technically classified as a motorcycle. At those speeds, she regularly sees children with traumatic injuries and broken bones after hitting bumps, cracks in the road, or other vehicles. Many of them aren’t wearing helmets or protective pads, and some are even riding barefoot, making their injuries even more severe. Martin’s video has gained traction on Reddit and elsewhere online.

E-bikes and e-scooters, examined

Martin isn’t the only professional seeing a growing problem. The American College of Surgeons reports that there are more than 20,000 e-bike-related injuries each year. Meanwhile, a University of California, San Francisco study found that e-bike injuries doubled annually from 2017 to 2022. The same study found that e-scooter injuries increased by 45% each year during the same period.

Before riding an e-bike, it’s important to follow proper safety procedures. Make sure you and your child understand your area’s laws regarding e-bikes, including any minimum age requirements. Always wear a helmet and other protective gear when riding. Consider choosing an e-bike with safety features such as motor-interrupt brake levers and disc brakes. These are just a few of the many safety tips experts recommend.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has similar safety tips for e-scooter riders. Wearing a helmet is one of its top recommendations, along with taking other basic precautions. The agency also recommends checking the brakes before riding and slowing down for bumps, cracks, and other road hazards.

The vast majority of e-scooters and e-bikes are designed for only one rider, so avoid doubling up. Although laws vary by state and locality, wearing more protective gear is always the safer choice. Riders should also review local e-bike and e-scooter laws to make sure they are operating the vehicles safely and legally.

A little research goes a long way toward making sure you and your children can ride safely. It’s also important for parents to understand that many e-bikes and e-scooters can travel at speeds that make them very different from a traditional bicycle. The last thing you want is for you or your child to become another emergency room statistic.

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Photo credit: Focus Pixel Art/Moment via Getty Images – At times, feeling personally grateful to someone can feel like a big ask – but there are other forms of gratitude.

Ethics, Ideas

How to be grateful to someone – even when you really don’t want to

A change in perspective can make gratitude easier.

Good Partner

7/17/2026

Mark Schroeder

There are few greater feelings than the sense of heartfelt gratitude to another human being who has done you a solid. Sincere thanks and reciprocation are part of the glue that binds us in human relationships.

But sometimes you’re just not feeling it. You know that you have benefited from what someone has done for you, but you don’t really feel grateful to them for doing it. Most teenagers go through this period with their parents. Maybe you take your partner or colleague for granted.

For me, 14 years ago, it was my mother-in-law. She had upended her life to move from South Dakota to California to live with my wife and me to assist with childcare after our daughter was born; no other source of childcare fit with our demanding work schedules and my commute. She made a huge sacrifice that transformed our lives, but there were moments when I really struggled to feel grateful.

Since that time, I’ve come to devote much of my research as a philosopher to studying how the way that we interpret each other as people shapes our relationships. That work has helped me to understand why I struggled to be grateful – and taught me a little bit about how to do better.

Personal gratitude

I’ve found that the hardest part of feeling grateful to someone is the “to” part. It is one thing to be impersonally grateful that something happened and another thing to be personally grateful to someone for doing it. These are not the same.

Both forms of gratitude require seeing something as a benefit. And they both require a humble recognition of how easily things could have been otherwise. When the rain ends a drought, an atheist can feel grateful that the tomatoes will survive. But the atheist isn’t grateful “to” anyone for the rain.

Priests offer prayers to Varuna, the Hindu god of rain, as they stand in the Osman Sagar on the outskirts of Hyderabad, India, on July 16, 2013. AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A

Personal gratitude requires more than impersonal gratitude. It is an example of what the philosopher Peter Strawson calls a “participant” attitude: an attitude that we have toward people, but not toward things. And a large theme in my work is that participant attitudes such as gratitude involve giving someone credit for what the attitude responds to.

But which benefits we give people credit for is complicated. As philosophers such as Tony Manela have argued, actions motivated primarily by money, self-interest or insecurity don’t merit personal gratitude, even when they benefit you. Actions motivated by love, generosity or concern, on the other hand – or other “pro-social” motives – do.

Sometimes people fail to feel gratitude because they take someone for granted, not noticing how easily they could have done otherwise. This wasn’t my problem with my mother-in-law. It was obvious that she didn’t have to move across the country to live with us.

But it was hard to avoid noticing that she had always wanted to live in California. Sometimes it is hard to feel grateful because of how we interpret someone’s motives. They could have done otherwise, but we don’t think their action was really “about us.”

Bad motives are easy to find

Sometimes ungenerous motives can help people to be generous. Your child’s kindergarten teacher isn’t a volunteer. They may be a naturally generous person – but still, they probably wouldn’t be working with your child on spelling, arithmetic and handling adversity if they weren’t getting a paycheck.

It’s still appropriate to be grateful to them. Their financial incentive to show up for work enables their generosity, rather than competing with it.

Your child’s teacher might be generous, but their job enables them to act on that generosity every day. svetikd/E+ via Getty Images

Elementary school teachers are not alone. After all, people’s decisions are often driven by many factors: some that merit gratitude and others that don’t. So if you go looking for selfish motives, you are bound to find some.

Take your partner, for example. They do something that benefits you: buying you flowers, filling your tank with gas or finally taking their turn to wash the dishes. They are partly motivated by generosity, love or communal spirit. But, as in any close relationship, sometimes they may be hoping to get something out of it: reciprocation, maybe, or getting you off their back.

It matters which of these you interpret as their “true” motive: Seeing it one way opens you up to gratitude, while the other precludes it.

What are ‘true’ motives?

The distinction between someone’s “true” motive and the other motives that enable it looks like the distinction between causes and enabling conditions. For example, when you drop a wine glass, the fragility of the glass enables the drop to cause the break, but it isn’t itself a cause of the break – the drop is.

In the case of the falling glass, there’s a clear, objective answer to what caused the break and what merely enabled it. But I believe that relating to people is deeply different than understanding physical things.

The key question in whether to be grateful to someone isn’t about which motives count as “causes.” It is about which cause we need to bring into focus in order to see the other person more clearly for who they are.

See it their way

In other words, it’s at least partly a matter of perspective. If someone does you a favor, but you know they’re hoping for something in return, you can see that as their “true” motive. But you don’t have to see it that way. Instead, you could see that motive as the condition they need for their generosity to thrive.

Shifting perspectives isn’t easy. When you’re doubting someone’s motives, their lack of generosity can feel obvious. But it helps to remember that people tend to believe they’re acting generously. If you want to respond with gratitude, try seeing them as they see themselves.

What if that doesn’t work?

Well, the next best thing to being grateful to someone is being grateful for them. Starting there is a good way to remind yourself of why you value this relations

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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