Policy director Phillip Longman argues that re-regulating airlines, rail, and trucking could improve service quality, reduce monopolistic practices, and revitalize America's heartland.

Donald Trump has vowed to pursue sweeping deregulation of the economy in his second term. He has also called for elimination of at least one federal agency—the Department of Education—and set Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to work deconstructing the remaining administrative state. 

So it might seem like an epic case of not reading the room to now propose that Democrats advocate for a new regulatory agency with broad powers over the single most critical sector of economy. Yet I am going to do just that, while hastening to point out to skeptical Republicans that if they get behind this proposal they will not only be more likely to achieve many of their stated goals, such as revitalizing heartland America and loosening ties to China, they will also be undoing the work of key Democrats of the last generation, from Ted Kennedy to Ralph Nader and Jimmy Carter. 

Starting in the late 1970s, Democrats enacted, with Republican support, a radical new policy idea. The press mostly treated it as a banal, technical matter. But over time this quiet policy shift would profoundly tilt the balance of political economic power in the United States and wind up hurting tens of millions of people in both blue states and red states. 

The radical idea was to get the government out of the business of regulating prices and terms of service in transportation markets. In all of American history, nothing like this had ever been tried before. In colonial times, Americans applied English laws dating back to the Middle Ages that prevented the owners of ferries, toll roads, and stagecoaches from charging some customers higher fares than others for the same trip. Later, American governments, at first at the state and local levels and later federally, banned this kind of discrimination whenever a new form of transportation came along, from canals, railroads, and steamships to trucks and airlines.

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