Originally published on Legal Planet.

Conservatives, with full support from Donald Trump, have come up with a menu of ways to weaken the regulatory state. In honor of National Backward Day – that's an actual thing, in case you're wondering, and it's today – let's think about reversing those ideas. In other words, let's try to come up with similar mechanisms to strengthen protections for public health and the environment instead of weakening protections. It's an interesting experiment, if nothing else.

Here's what the Backward Day effort might look like:

The 2-for-1 Executive Order. One of Trump's first actions was to issue an executive order calling for repealing two regulations for every new regulation. Let's reverse that: if the government is going to repeal a regulation that protects public health or the environment, it needs to adopt two new protective regulations to take its place. After all, protecting the …

Originally published on Legal Planet.

Republicans are apparently worried that if Trump could use emergency powers by declaring border security a national emergency, the next president could do the same thing for climate change. There's no doubt that this would be far more legitimate than Trump's wall effort. Border crossings are much lower than they were ten years ago; he has said in the recent past that his prior efforts have vastly improved border security. In contrast, the Pentagon has classified climate change as a threat to national security, and Congress under Republican control has even endorsed this view. Furthermore, scientists have made it clear that we have a limited time to head off a disastrous outcome.

With that in mind, I did some quick research to see what powers a president might have to take emergency action against climate change. This doesn't mean I think it's …

This op-ed was orignally published in the Washington Monthly.

In December of 2017, Donald Trump gathered the press for a variation on a familiar activity from his real estate mogul days. Stretched between a tower of paper taller than himself, representing all current federal regulations, and a small stack labeled "1960," was a thick piece of red ribbon – red tape, if you will. The president promised that "we're going to get back below that 1960s level." With his daughter Ivanka and other advisors by his side, Trump used comically large scissors to cut the ribbon.

Cutting regulations has been a priority for nearly every Republican politician since at least the 1980s. But the Trump-era GOP, unsatisfied with the existing deregulatory toolkit, has found a bigger pair of scissors. Call it cost-cost analysis: to justify getting rid of regulations they dislike, Republicans have decided to systematically …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

In terms of regulatory policy, the second half of Trump's term is shaping up to look a lot like Obama's final two years in office. Congress won't be doing much to advance Trump's environment and energy agenda, as was the case with Obama. So, like Obama, Trump's focus will be on administrative action, particularly regulatory initiatives (or deregulatory ones, in Trump's case). The big question is how these efforts will fare in court. I want to discuss three aspects of that question: timing, judicial review of statutory issues, and judicial review of policy analysis.

Timing. The Trump people are keenly aware that some of Obama's most important rules were still in the litigation process when he left office, which has kept those rules hanging in the wind for the two years since Trump took office. They seem desperate to avoid the same fate …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

This is the second of three posts assessing the first two years of the Trump administration. You can read the first post here.

We all seem to be subscribed to the "All Trump News, All the Time" newsfeed. It may be helpful to step back a bit and compare Trump with his last Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

How do the two stack up? Bush and Trump were very different in character and style, but their regulatory aims were similar. Bush and Trump were both trying to steer the country in the same directions in terms of regulatory policy: increased use of fossil fuels, less environmental regulation. But the Republican Party has been radicalized since Bush's day, and in environmental affairs, the Trump administration reflects that radicalization.

For instance, whereas Bush actually created important ocean national monuments (though it was a bit out …

Cross-posted from Legal Planet.

In September 2017 – that seems so long ago! – Eric Biber and I released a report assessing the state of play in environmental issues 200 days into the Trump administration, based on an earlier series of blog posts. As we end Trump's second year, it's time to bring that assessment up to date. This is the first of three posts examining what Trump has done (and hasn't done) in terms of environment and energy.

For this first post, I'll follow the same outline as the 9/17 report but omit a lot of the detail.

Legislation. Eric and I considered substantive legislative changes very unlikely although potentially very damaging. Almost no substantive changes have made it through Congress. The one exception was the provision in the Senate tax bill for opening up ANWR for drilling, which was able to use reconciliation procedures since it …

This post was originally published as part of a symposium on ACSblog, the blog of the American Constitution Society. Reprinted with permission.

Presidents since Ronald Reagan have, by executive order, required agencies to submit significant regulatory actions to the White House for review. Academic and public interest observers have variously criticized this review as slow, opaque, chaotic, lawless, and power-grabbing. Yet every president in the intervening years has not only embraced but also deepened the control of the White House over individual regulations.

Even President Obama, who announced early in his first term that he was conducting a top-to-bottom review of this process, ultimately embraced strict White House control over the rulemaking proceedings of the executive agencies. President Trump has taken White House control over rules to a whole different dimension by ordering agencies to revoke two existing rules for every new rule they issue and by …

Scott Mugno, Vice President for Safety, Sustainability, and Vehicle Maintenance at Fed Ex Ground in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is President Trump's pick to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Although whispers of Mugno's possible nomination had spread across Washington, D.C., over the past several months, not much has been said about his credentials for the job. One major concern is Mugno's connection to the notoriously anti-regulatory U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for which he is currently the chairman of the OSHA subcommittee of the group's Labor Relations Committee. And as Jordan Barab, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, highlights in his excellent blog post on the nomination, Mugno expressed interest in sunsetting OSHA standards in comments he made at a Chamber event last year. 

When Mugno goes before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation hearings, it will be imperative …

Last month, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke submitted his long-anticipated report to President Trump that recommends dismantling and looting some of America's treasured monuments and antiquities. (This was interesting timing, given that the president stood firmly behind the preservation of some other, far less-cherished monuments.)

In anticipation of the report, Theodore Roosevelt IV, the 26th president's great-grandson, wrote a letter to the editor in the Houston Chronicle telling Zinke that his actions have failed to live up to the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt, whom the Secretary of the Interior claims to admire. The lifelong Republican wrote that, in stark contrast to Zinke and Trump, his great-grandfather had a "fierce determination to take on profiteers who were seeking to exploit public lands for private gains."

Picking up where Roosevelt IV left off, it is worth exploring this point a little further, as it reveals perhaps the …