While Environmental Protection Agency-hating EPA chief Scott Pruitt is mostly in the news these days for his spending spree of taxpayers’ money and his ethically twisted behavior, actions that have sparked a growing call for him to resign, the former Oklahoma attorney general continues to launch sorties against environmental and energy-related rules the Trump regime wants to roll back as a favor to its corporate puppeteers. Environmental advocates are justifiably appalled. But they are also cheered a bit by the incompetence being displayed in the rollback efforts.
As Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman report, the sloppiness with which Pruitt and his team are presenting their arguments for diluting or demolishing eco-rules isn’t making the grade in court. Judges have rejected six Pruitt attempts to reverse Obama-era regulations—including those on lead paint and methane emissions—and more rejections are probably on the way:
“In their rush to get things done, they’re failing to dot their i’s and cross their t’s. And they’re starting to stumble over a lot of trip wires,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They’re producing a lot of short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.” [...]
“If the goal is to generate temporary relief and to make a splash, then what they’re doing is terrifically fine,” said Jonathan H. Adler, director of the Center for Business Law & Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
But if the Trump administration wants to permanently change the regulatory environment for business, he said, the E.P.A. cannot take such a “quick and dirty approach” to unraveling regulations. “I’m suspicious that two, three years down the road there’s going to be much to show for all the fireworks we’re getting now,” Mr. Adler said.
A key example is the regime’s move to roll back the Obama administration’s automobile fuel-efficiency rule, something the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the climate science deniers at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have been pushing with letters and closed-door meetings with Pruitt and his minions since soon after Trump took the oath of office 15 months ago. Pruitt formally announced the rollback on Tuesday, presenting a 38-page document mostly brimful of quotes from advocates of watering down the rule.
Under Obama, the EPA produced a 1,217-page, data-jammed technical and economic analysis in support of the rule. It requires new passenger vehicles to have an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The Pruitt rollback document contains paltry data. It’s not unlike the hole-riddled paperwork he presented in the 14 lawsuits he filed against the EPA when he was attorney general. He lost most of those cases.
Some of the most partisan judges—the kind with which Trump is working to fill the federal bench—might be amenable to rollbacks. But most just aren’t going to decide to toss a rule that has undergone rigorous, years-long study and generated tons of mostly favorable feedback from scientists and citizens alike. At least not when the counter-argument is a vacuous piece of undisguised propaganda. What we’re seeing from Pruitt on the policy front is mostly flash without substance.
This doesn’t mean Pruitt is not doing damage. While many of the policies he is trying to redact or reverse are probably safe, he is killing morale at the EPA, giving veteran staffers reason to take early retirement, delaying potential environmental gains based on sound science by directing so much energy toward wrecking existing programs, and pushing budget cuts that will further weaken an agency that has seen numerous cuts already in the past few years.
So pushing for his resignation because he is vulnerable on other than policy grounds, including flat-out corruption, makes sense. The only problem is that, if Pruitt does resign or the fickle Trump changes his mind and fires him, his replacement is unlikely to be more than marginally better.