It’s been exactly a year since Trump took the oath of office. While he’s been busy telling over 2,000 lies, the president has managed to find time to demonstrate both the vulnerability and resiliency of the federal government and regulatory policy.
There are a number of ways you can look back at 2017, as the new Climate of Trump page shows. With a double-database of climate impacts and Trump impacts, a highlight reel of 2017, and general overview of the anti-science, anti-people, pro-pollution Trump agenda, this new resource rounds up a lot of the stuff we’ve covered over the year. Similarly, the new Silencing Science tracker from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center compiles nearly 100 examples of how Trump has censored the science and scientists to serve his anti-regulatory agenda.
Nowhere has that pro-polluter agenda been more obvious than the EPA. In his latest piece for the Huffington Post, Alex Kaufman talked to former EPA administrators who have sharp words for how Pruitt’s run the agency. George W. Bush’s EPA admin, Christine Todd Whitman, called Pruitt and Trump’s single-minded anti-Obama approach “mindless,” while Clinton’s admin Carol Browner noted that they’re “conscientiously tearing the place down.”
Heartland, of course, is pleased with this idea: in a newsletter sent last week, the institute tallies up its wins, referring to a scorecard with Trump’s actions on one side and its wishlist on the other. Ever-adverse to truth and reality, Heartland claims as “DONE” some things that are definitely not yet accomplished, like withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and repealing the Clean Power Plan.
Even the other red-tape-cutting isn’t as clear cut as Heartland would like--(de)regulatory actions take a while, and are subject to litigation. For example, Danny Vinik writes in Politco this week about Trump’s claim to have cut 22 regulations for every rule he’s made, supposedly cutting costs by $8.1 billion in costs. But according to Vinik, “the vast majority of that $8.1 billion in savings came from the repeal of a single federal contracting rule.”
As Vinik reports, much of Trump’s deregulatory agenda lies in the hands of Neomi Rao, a professor at a Koch-sponsored law center who leads White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rao acknowledges the huge amount of work ahead, telling Vinik that undoing the big rules “requires a careful process, all new cost-benefit analysis, all of the rulemaking that needs to take place to unravel a big rule.”
But even Trump’s supporters wouldn’t describe him as “careful.” The trouble he is already having, and will continue to have, in governing is why NY Mag’s Jonathan Chait wrote that Trump’s assault on all things Obama hasn’t destroyed 44’s legacy, but rather “Revealed How Impressive It Was.”
Though really we won’t know that until the litigation runs its course, which will take years. But hey, better regu-late than never!
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