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Trump's EPA DEREGULATE
Posted on: February 21, 2023 at 13:05:23 CT
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Regulations are among the the stocks-in-trade of government—they are the tools through which the Environmental Protection Agency implements anti-pollution laws, the Interior Department enforces land-use provisions and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau restricts payday lenders. The chief debates over regulation center on the philosophical and ideological differences over government’s responsibilities versus free market rights.
For the Trump administration and many conservatives, it has become an article of faith that regulations are out of control and should be pared back, and there’s plenty of popular support for that view. A January Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 44 percent of Americans thought “reduced federal regulation on businesses” was “a good thing,” compared with 42 percent who saw it as “bad thing.”
But to many regulatory professionals in and out of government, the Trump agenda raises questions of process.
“EPA abruptly reverses a rule addressing hazardous air pollution following a single request from the [Environment and Public Works] committee chairman,” shouted a January press release from Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., attacking both EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the chairman of the panel on which he is ranking member. “While citing no analysis of the public health impacts of this decision, Administrator Pruitt’s EPA has proactively allowed polluters to increase output of toxic air pollution.”
At EPA, as well as Interior, “decisions for the most part are made without consulting or seeking advice from long-time experts,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “At EPA, the decision gets made to repeal the clean water rule to go in a different direction. So they assemble the career staff, which is then directed by a political appointee without a paper trail,” he said.
“It took Pruitt’s people five days to rewrite a cost-benefit analysis that took more than two years to write and reach an opposite conclusion,” he added, referring to the Obama administration’s controversial Waters of the United States rule on protecting wetlands. “They reach a conclusion that wetlands have no value, none that is knowable” to delay the effective date of the rule.
Ruch also thinks EPA rulemakers know that this new approach is “legally vulnerable to a challenge as arbitrary and capricious.”
But the notion that an agency can foist opinions of politicians or industry lobbyists onto a regulatory agency of professionals sounds far-fetched to Susan Dudley, the director of The George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center who ran the White House regulatory office under President George W. Bush. “We have a government of checks and balances, and expertise is very valuable,” she said. “There’s no way they can make these decisions simply based on politics. I can’t think of an agency staffer who would say they want to get rid of a rule that provides enormous benefits to the public and put in a rule that does not.”
Yet career employees, despite their famous pride in serving under different administrations, are clearly steered by their agency’s political leadership. “I’m not sure expertise really matters much because what is happening now is that the Trump administration, through its appointees, is implementing executive orders,” said Peter Wallison, who holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Market Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are sending signals to the business community that there would be much less regulation, which is a tremendous force in business for being first out of the gate when a major change is happening,” he said.
“It does take some expertise when you’re in the agencies to know how to pull back and stop a regulation in process. And yes, expertise is necessary to understand what Congress wanted the agency to do and to faithfully execute the laws,” Wallison added. “But they then have to consider that the Trump administration and the person now heading the agency wants them to meet their statutory regulations and not overregulate.”
Rao herself professes “very strong respect for the expertise of career staff,” as she told an audience at the Brookings Institution in February. Many of them are motivated by “competition between agencies,” she said, in not wanting to be last in paring back rules that “are no longer helping the American people,”
For the Trump administration and many conservatives, it has become an article of faith that regulations are out of control and should be pared back, and there’s plenty of popular support for that view. A January Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that 44 percent of Americans thought “reduced federal regulation on businesses” was “a good thing,” compared with 42 percent who saw it as “bad thing.”
But to many regulatory professionals in and out of government, the Trump agenda raises questions of process.
“EPA abruptly reverses a rule addressing hazardous air pollution following a single request from the [Environment and Public Works] committee chairman,” shouted a January press release from Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., attacking both EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and the chairman of the panel on which he is ranking member. “While citing no analysis of the public health impacts of this decision, Administrator Pruitt’s EPA has proactively allowed polluters to increase output of toxic air pollution.”
At EPA, as well as Interior, “decisions for the most part are made without consulting or seeking advice from long-time experts,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “At EPA, the decision gets made to repeal the clean water rule to go in a different direction. So they assemble the career staff, which is then directed by a political appointee without a paper trail,” he said.
“It took Pruitt’s people five days to rewrite a cost-benefit analysis that took more than two years to write and reach an opposite conclusion,” he added, referring to the Obama administration’s controversial Waters of the United States rule on protecting wetlands. “They reach a conclusion that wetlands have no value, none that is knowable” to delay the effective date of the rule.
Ruch also thinks EPA rulemakers know that this new approach is “legally vulnerable to a challenge as arbitrary and capricious.”
But the notion that an agency can foist opinions of politicians or industry lobbyists onto a regulatory agency of professionals sounds far-fetched to Susan Dudley, the director of The George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center who ran the White House regulatory office under President George W. Bush. “We have a government of checks and balances, and expertise is very valuable,” she said. “There’s no way they can make these decisions simply based on politics. I can’t think of an agency staffer who would say they want to get rid of a rule that provides enormous benefits to the public and put in a rule that does not.”
Yet career employees, despite their famous pride in serving under different administrations, are clearly steered by their agency’s political leadership. “I’m not sure expertise really matters much because what is happening now is that the Trump administration, through its appointees, is implementing executive orders,” said Peter Wallison, who holds the Arthur F. Burns Chair in Financial Market Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “They are sending signals to the business community that there would be much less regulation, which is a tremendous force in business for being first out of the gate when a major change is happening,” he said.
“It does take some expertise when you’re in the agencies to know how to pull back and stop a regulation in process. And yes, expertise is necessary to understand what Congress wanted the agency to do and to faithfully execute the laws,” Wallison added. “But they then have to consider that the Trump administration and the person now heading the agency wants them to meet their statutory regulations and not overregulate.”
Rao herself professes “very strong respect for the expertise of career staff,” as she told an audience at the Brookings Institution in February. Many of them are motivated by “competition between agencies,” she said, in not wanting to be last in paring back rules that “are no longer helping the American people,”
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Trump's EPA DEREGULATE - Ace AU - 2/21 13:05:23