it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time. They could have done this years ago but why if they couldn't benefit as well?
As a general rule, it is _way harder_ to make things worse than to make things better, politically, especially where it is clear to the average person that you are making things worse, and this is something that most normal people will regard as making things better.
Now, you could argue that net neutrality was also one of these, but net neutrality is, to the layperson, fairly obscure, and easy for a government who wants to get rid of it to lie about. This rule isn't at all obscure, most people have personal experience of the problem it solves, and it would be virtually impossible to spin revoking it as a good thing.
> it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time.
This is, more or less, just a problem with the American system of government; so much of the civil service is appointees that every four to eight years there is a period where everyone at the top of the organisation changes, causing everything to grind to a halt for a while.