The word deregulation has been doing a lot of work in American politics for about fifty years now, and it has done most of that work by sounding like something other than what it usually is. It sounds like freedom. Fewer rules, less government, more room to breathe. When a politician says it, the implied audience is the small business owner, the farmer, the individual trying to get out from under a stack of forms. That is almost never who primarily benefits.
Reagan used it to dismantle airline regulation in ways that genuinely did lower ticket prices for a while, before the industry consolidated into the oligopoly we have today. He used it on savings and loans in ways that produced a financial crisis that cost taxpayers roughly a hundred and sixty billion dollars. He used it on telecommunications in ways that have left Americans paying more for slower internet than people in most of the developed world. The deregulation record is mixed at best, catastrophic at worst, and the pitch never changes.
What matters is always whose regulation gets removed and what fills the vacuum. When you remove federal labor protections without replacing them with anything, the employer fills the vacuum. When you remove environmental review requirements, the company fills the vacuum. When you remove financial oversight, the bank fills the vacuum. Deregulation is not the absence of rules. It's a transfer of rulemaking authority from public bodies to private ones, and the private ones are not accountable to you.
Precision about this matters, because the imprecision is the strategy. When the language is vague, the beneficiary stays invisible. And invisible beneficiaries are very hard to hold accountable.