| This week we were poised to put Chinese AI on our cover once again—having featured it on the front page in our Asia edition last week. Instead, as the markets calmed down and Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to the federal bureaucracy and foreign assistance, we chose instead to focus on the anti-red-tape revolution that is taking hold around the world.
Red tape is proliferating because it is easy to come up with new rules—to protect against online scams or the warming of the planet—but very hard to get rid of them. From Buenos Aires and Delhi to London and Washington, politicians desperate for growth want to be rid of unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. Done right, this could usher in greater freedom, faster growth, lower prices and new technology.
As our Briefing sets out, Americans spend a total of 12bn hours a year complying with federal rules. Mr Trump is right to take the sledgehammer to these layers of bureaucracy, but he risks causing the sort of chaos and suffering that would give deregulation a bad name. The question, for him and others, is how to make reforms bold enough to count but coherent enough to succeed.
Our designers enjoyed working on this week’s cover, in which our masthead is partially obscured by red tape. You can now browse through all of our covers from the past year in this interactive guide to our Cover Story newsletter. And if you think you have what it takes to design an Economist cover, enter our competition by February 3rd. Your entries will come directly to me and our designers—no red tape, in other words. | 
