The Congressional Review Act: Trump's First-Year Participation Trophy
Perhaps because he has so few real accomplishments to his name, President Donald Trump has developed a nasty habit of embellishing his record. From the size of the crowd at his inauguration to the number of floors in Trump Tower, he simply won't let a little thing like "reality" or "facts" or even "cardinal numbers" get in the way of his estimation of his own self-worth. Expect this behavior to be on full display at tomorrow night's State of the Union Address, where Trump will no doubt make several baseless claims about his achievements during his first year as Commander-in-Chief. One success he may tout – use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal 15 regulatory safeguards – is a good example of such a claim that withers under scrutiny.
The CRA is a "Contract with America"-era law designed to short-circuit Congress's deliberative process and allow narrow partisan majorities to attack broadly popular public safeguards on behalf of politically powerful interests. Specifically, the CRA creates a special form of legislation known as a "joint resolution of disapproval," a sort of legislative veto of regulatory agencies' work, that, once enacted, immediately repeals a recently issued regulation. What makes …
Next Tuesday, President Trump will share his view of the state of our union. And if his words correlate with his actions over the last year, the dominant theme will be one of division and disruption. Like no president in recent history, Donald Trump has pushed U.S. residents to cordon ourselves off into dueling tribes whose theories of governance and policymaking diverge and whose basic facts and language are starting to split in disturbing ways.
But on whichever side of the divide each of us finds ourselves, most of us face some common challenges in daily life, including keeping ourselves and our kids safe and healthy, earning fair pay for a day's work, and steering clear of the predatory business practices that are difficult to spot without graduate-level work in deciphering fine print.
Until this time last year, we had federal agencies teeming with dedicated …
On January 8, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) struck a resounding blow against the Trump administration's ill-advised agenda to put its thumb on the scale of the energy market by propping up the coal industry, unanimously rejecting a controversial proposal by Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry. Perry's plan would have resulted in working families and small businesses subsidizing the coal industry to the tune of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Dozens of energy policy experts have explained the substantive issues of this action, but I want to focus on an important procedural matter – namely, how this episode demonstrates the importance of guarding the actual independence of independent regulatory agencies like FERC.
FERC is among a class of federal administrative agencies that Congress specially designed to be reasonably "independent" from political interference by the president, hence the moniker "independent regulatory …
CPR’s Member Scholars and staff rounded out a prolific year of op-ed writing with pieces covering several topics, touching on the Endangered Species Act, the scuttling of criminal justice reform, saving the Chesapeake Bay, the Administration’s efforts to unravel the Clean Power Plan, and the tax bill President Trump signed into law last week. You can read all 46 of this year's op-eds here, but here’s a brief roundup of the latest:
In an October 29, 2017, piece in The Hill, Bill Buzbee says that the Trump administration’s efforts to wish away the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan are headed for “rocky shoals.” Among other problems, the repeal push is proceeding in the absence of a formal rulemaking process. “Just last year,” he writes, “the Supreme Court reiterated that an agency proposing a policy change must provide a ‘reasoned explanation for …
This post was originally released as a press statement on December 14 in response to President Donald Trump's speech on deregulation and his administration's Fall 2017 Unified Agenda.
Starting on Day One, the Trump administration has perpetrated an all-out assault on essential public safeguards for health, safety, the environment, and American families' financial security, and today, the president took the time to revel in all the damage he has overseen. The administration's anti-safeguard agenda for the coming year promises more of the same.
For the president, this is about helping big-monied interests make more money. For everyday Americans, it's about making sure our kids can breathe clean air and drink clean water, saving for retirement, keeping workplaces safe, protecting our natural treasures, and warding off the worst effects of climate change.
In his remarks today, President Trump included a lot of numbers. Here …
Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission was the high-water mark of the Supreme Court's expansion of the takings clause, which makes it unconstitutional for the government to take private property without compensation. Lucas epitomized the late Justice Scalia's crusade to limit government regulation of property. The decision left environmentalists and regulators quaking in their boots, especially because of its possible impact on protection for wetlands and habitat for endangered species. Ultimately, however, Scalia failed to make a compelling case for ignoring other language in earlier cases dating back decades that spoke broadly of the government's power to limit harmful uses of property, rather than imposing the limits of common law doctrines on the government. Twenty-five years later, it is striking how little impact the case has had.
Understanding the reasons requires something of a deep dive into the case and its complicated legal setting …
Today, I will testify before two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee at a hearing that I hope will provide a critical examination of the Trump administration's so-called "Regulatory Reform Task Forces." Created by Trump's Executive Order 13777, these task forces are essentially designed to be "hit squads" embedded at each agency with the goal of carrying out the Trump administration's assault on public safeguards from within. In my testimony, I provide a comprehensive critique of the task forces, as well as Executive Orders 13771 and 13777, which they are charged with implementing. Ultimately, I conclude that the orders should be repealed and the task forces be disbanded.
In my testimony, I highlight four fatal flaws with the task forces and the work they do. These flaws include: (1) the public harms they will create; (2) their lack of a rational policy basis; (3 …
On August 27, as Hurricane Harvey blew through the Houston area, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found itself between the proverbial rock and hard place. Since the 1940s, it had operated a flood control project to control the risk of flood damage to downtown Houston and the Houston Ship Channel. It had accomplished this by carefully controlling the release of flood waters from the project's dams. Now, however, the Corps confronted Hurricane Harvey, a megastorm generating massive, unprecedented volumes of flood water.
The Corps faced the choice of either limiting water releases from the project to protect downstream properties at the cost of flooding upstream properties, or increasing project releases to protect upstream properties at the cost of flooding downstream properties. Not surprisingly, the Corps' decision on August 27 and on the following days, to release up to 13,000 cubic feet per second …
CPR's Member Scholars and staff have continued to appear in the nation's op-ed pages to expose the ongoing assault on our safeguards by President Trump and Congress. Among recent examples:
Dan Farber's July 5 article in The Hill highlighted the many flaws in legislation introduced by Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) designed to encumber the development of regulatory safeguards. In "Tangling life-saving regulations in red tape," Farber writes, "The bill would impose needlessly complex procedures that will hamper agency e?orts to protect the public interest far more than it will improve agency decision making. And, of course, for many of the bill's supporters, that's exactly the point. Nothing about this proposal is intended to foster safer workplaces, food and consumer, and nothing about it would improve public health or the environment. The purpose is to delay or defeat rules that …
UPDATE: President Trump is no longer scheduled to speak on deregulation on October 2, but the planned deregulatory "summit" with various cabinet-level agencies is still slated to occur.
Government-sanctioned cruelty makes for shocking images, as the events of the past few weeks demonstrate. People in wheelchairs forcibly dragged from congressional hearing rooms for protesting legislative attempts to strip them of access to affordable health care. The uncertainty on the faces of Puerto Rican parents as they survey the damage to their homes in the wake of Hurricane Maria and wonder when – or if – officials in Washington will come to the aid of their families and those of their fellow citizens.
In a White House speech scheduled for Monday, October 2, President Trump will affirm in no uncertain terms that his administration does not merely tolerate such brazen indifference to our country's most vulnerable members but intends …
