Trump's Deregulatory Agenda Is an Assault on Climate-Threatened Communities
Late last week, we shared our first take on how the Trump administration's 2017 deregulatory agenda threatens to knock the wheels off of agency efforts to protect workers, consumers, and vulnerable populations – like children and homeless families – from air pollution, flooding, and explosions in the workplace, among other hazards. After some additional research, we have also found that the administration's agenda takes aim at safeguards for victims of disasters, such as communities that face the threat of displacement or relocation caused by climate change, and at programs that enhance community resilience in the rural areas that President Trump counts among his base of support.
Several federal agencies – including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Agriculture, and the Interior, to name a few – play a crucial role in implementing federal climate adaptation policies. Yet, across the board at all of these agencies, their regulatory agendas have been turned upside down. Among other things, they now contain several withdrawn, inactive, sidelined, and even newly proposed rulemakings that are likely to make relocation of climate-threatened households even more burdensome and the prospect of recovery grimmer for disaster-stricken rural communities. Here is a brief rundown of several of those pending …
President Trump's first Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, released last week, aims to cut regulations across the board, but the broad swath of energy programs and regulations under the ax is particularly notable. The U.S. energy sector, finally catching up with the rest of the world, has modernized by leaps and bounds in recent years with the help of limited but targeted governmental support. But Trump's agenda would bring this all to an abrupt halt and send us skidding back into the dark ages of energy.
First, the agenda would cut the bulk of pending programming at the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. This office provides critical support for energy efficiency and modern, clean, economically vital sources of energy, no small matter to our economy or our quality of life.
If energy efficiency measures were comprehensively …
The newest dangerous proposal filtering through Congress is H.R. 2887, the "No Regulation Without Representation Act of 2017." Packaged as a prohibition on states regulating outside of their borders, the bill is a Trojan horse that usurps the states' role in the federal system and threatens their ability to protect their own citizens from harm. The House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law is taking up the bill in a hearing today, July 25, and Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholars have submitted a letter opposing the bill.
Poor drafting obscures impact
The bill itself is challenging to read. It is poorly drafted and hides its true impact behind generic terminology and rabbit-hole definitions. Here is a summary of the key language – after which a concrete example helps demonstrate its meaning.
The bill contains a prohibition: states may not …
When President Trump released his spring Unified Agenda last week, he made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in protecting workers from occupational injuries and diseases. The White House released the agenda amid what it called “Made in America” week, but instead of recognizing workers and advocating for safe and healthy jobs and fair wages, Trump brought manufacturers to the nation’s capital to show off their products. When it comes to working families, Trump is ignoring what should be his highest priority – ensuring that every person who leaves home for a job in the morning returns at the end of the day without injury or illness.
The regulatory agenda for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is devoid of any plans that would address the litany of significant health and safety hazards workers face on a daily basis. Rather, OSHA has cut down …
On Monday, July 17, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) convened a public meeting to hear input from stakeholders about how the agency might grow and strengthen its Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP). Given the change in administration, the announcement was no surprise.
Growing the VPP had also been a priority of the George W. Bush administration, during which time OSHA made plans to add thousands of new participants despite having no evidence the program improved worker health and safety. Resource constraints ultimately tempered OSHA’s expansion plans, but not before the agency had damaged the VPP and eroded its integrity. With this history in mind, I attended this week’s stakeholder meeting to urge the agency to learn from the past and reevaluate the VPP’s performance and cost-effectiveness before it moves to expand it. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) or the Department of Labor (DOL …
Early this morning, the Trump administration released its Spring 2017 Regulatory Agenda, which outlines the regulatory and deregulatory actions the administration expects to take over the next 12 months. Because it is the first of the Trump administration, this document is particularly significant. By comparing it with the last Regulatory Agenda of the Obama administration, which was released in fall of 2016, we are able to see what pending regulatory actions the Trump administration has abandoned or delayed. Only a preliminary review is necessary to confirm the harm the outlined policies would do to the nation's hard-working families and communities and how they would exacerbate social inequality throughout our country.
Strikingly, the Spring 2017 Regulatory Agenda also offers the first concrete evidence of how the Trump administration intends to implement its harmful "one-in, two-out" executive order, which calls upon agencies to eliminate or weaken two existing …
Early in the Trump administration, news about delayed and "disappeared" rules emerged in several media outlets. Many of these delays were driven by a memo issued by Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on January 20, 2017, which "froze" the implementation of rules until March 21, 2017, so that a representative of the administration could review them. Freezing rules for a limited amount of time is standard practice for newly inaugurated presidents. But the White House and agency administrators like the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Scott Pruitt soon decided to move beyond the Priebus memo to impose further delays, some as long as a year or two, so that industry-friendly changes could be crafted without having to undergo the full rigor of a rulemaking process. Many of the targeted Obama-era rules were designed to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment …
June 22 marked the one-year anniversary of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, the first major update to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) since its original enactment in 1976. The measure set a one-year deadline for EPA to complete several actions to implement the law, including finalizing its procedural rules on chemical prioritization and risk evaluation and releasing key documents related to the initial ten chemicals the agency has chosen to evaluate. (See all implementation activities here.)
One of those initial ten chemicals is asbestos, as it should be, since EPA determined some 28 years ago that there's no safe level of exposure. In fact, based on this evidence, EPA attempted to phase out nearly all uses of asbestos in the United States, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ban in 1991. The court said that EPA …
This post builds from an interview with the author for WYPR's The Environment in Focus with Tom Pelton, a portion of which aired on Wednesday, July 12, 2017.
One question I've been asked a number of times over the last several years is, "What does the Clean Water Rule mean for the Chesapeake Bay?" With EPA's recent proposal to repeal the rule, I'm once again hearing questions and speculation about what this repeal will mean for the Bay watershed.
I think the average person is rightly confused about the Clean Water Rule, sometimes called the Waters of the United States rule, and why they hear so much about it. Whereas most disputes involving environmental law are about providing the right standard or level of protection, the Clean Water Rule was simply about drawing clear boundary lines around waters that are and are not protected by the …
Earlier this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) took decisive action to protect hardworking people who are cheated by banks or other financial institutions. Specifically, the federal agency issued a rule limiting what are known as "forced arbitration" agreements in the contracts we must all sign when we open a bank account or purchase certain kinds of financial products and services. Last year, scholars and staff at the Center for Progressive Reform authored a report that supported CFPB's efforts and asked the agency to adopt an even stronger set of protections for consumers. Although the agency did not adopt the stronger provisions, the final rule nevertheless offers crucial protections for American consumers. We are therefore concerned about the rule's ultimate fate in the courts and in Congress.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, nearly all financial contracts include a clause that requires them to enter into …
