The Trump administration's initial efforts to attack financial regulations will include directing federal agencies to reverse changes that have been made through guidance rather than formal rule-making, a key aide to Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday.

The White House is trying to fill vacancies at the banking-industry watchdogs "in short order," Mark Calabria, Pence's chief economist, said at a National Association for Business Economics conference in Washington. Once President Donald Trump's people are in place, he said, they can quickly roll back supervisory efforts they think aren't appropriate.

"Since so much of the Obama-era financial regulation was by guidance — and, I would say, regulation by enforcement — that part of the Obama era can be easily erased once we have new regulators in place," Calabria said. He specifically referenced the Federal Reserve and other bank regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.