The irony was that the Great Liberal Lion Ted Kennedy played a key role in a lot of this deregulation, especially trucking, he and Carter were basically inventing "neo-liberalism" or Clinton's DLC or Tony Blair's "Third Way" before anyone cared enough to label it.
They and some of the Liberal Republicans of the era, notably Romney under Nixon*, felt that the problem of "liberalism" was that it had become too bureaucratic, was still based around 1930's designs and wasn't actually responding to modern needs. You saw some of this late in the century with the "paperless government" that came out of Al Gore's commission. Basically that, having five million file cabinets may have been how you had to do it in 1935 but does more harm than good in 1995 or 2035 for meeting the goals of the program.
Reagan road the wave with rhetoric but he was never actually doing much unlike Carter, let alone Thatcher. (Of course Thatcher had absolute power essentially to slash through the UK government.)
*Who Nixon appointed to HUD to get rid of him as a challenger, and then the guy was trying to do all sorts of stuff to make the department work and asking for Nixon's time and support, which was annoying, so Nixon eventually just stopped allowing him to meet with him lol
