Trump Lowers Cost Of Living By Freeing Americans To Tamper With The Pollution Controls On Their Own Cars

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Calling it a victory for working families, President Donald J. Trump on Monday signed a presidential memorandum titled "Lowering the Cost of Living by Promoting the Freedom to Fix," granting Americans the long-denied liberty to remove, disable, or otherwise repair the very pollution controls their vehicles were built to keep running.

The memorandum directs the Environmental Protection Agency to issue guidance within 30 days clarifying which parts of a car's emissions system a citizen may lawfully take apart, and instructs the agency to consider deprioritizing civil enforcement against any individual who, in good faith, returns a vehicle to what the document calls its "original configuration." Administration officials described the measure as a historic act of consumer freedom, noting that for too long Americans had been forced to drive vehicles that did exactly what federal law required of them.

"For years the federal government told you that you could not touch the device on your own car that scrubs poison out of the air your kids breathe," said one source within the administration, adding that those days were finally over. "If a hardworking American wants to spend a Saturday restoring his truck to the way it ran before the catalytic converter, that is between him, his wrench, and everyone downwind."

The order arrives as the capstone of a yearlong effort to relieve the automobile of its environmental obligations. Since taking office, the President has reset federal fuel economy standards to levels achievable by conventional gasoline engines, set the penalty for violating those standards at zero dollars, ended California's electric vehicle mandate, and revoked the scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, a document the White House has repeatedly called the single largest deregulatory action in American history.

Central to Monday's memorandum is a directive to route around the California Air Resources Board, currently the only body whose certification the Clean Air Act recognizes for aftermarket parts. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency intends to "break that monopoly" by encouraging alternative certifiers, a reform officials said would flood the market with parts that no single state agency had slowed down by first confirming they actually work. Right to repair advocates, who have spent years asking automakers to unlock the proprietary software that genuinely makes modern repairs difficult and expensive, observed that the memorandum addressed essentially none of that, and instead chiefly freed the performance-parts industry to sell components that make engines louder, faster, and dirtier.

At press time, the President had clarified that the new freedom to fix extended to a citizen's carburetor, his exhaust, and his tailpipe, but under no circumstances to the climate.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who adds another "cost of living" signing ceremony to a record otherwise defined by tariffs and inflation, while owing nothing to the families whose repair bills the memorandum does not actually lower.
§The aftermarket performance-parts industry, led by trade groups such as SEMA, which gains a federal invitation to sell emissions-defeating and "delete" components without waiting on California's certification.
§Oil and gas producers, who benefit any time the nation's vehicles are encouraged to burn more fuel less cleanly.
§Automakers, freed across the same twelve months from fuel economy penalties, the endangerment finding, and California's EV requirements, and now from much of the liability for what owners do to the emissions systems afterward.
§Owners of modified high-emitting vehicles, who receive assurance that the EPA has been told to look the other way.
§Everyone except the people downwind, who keep breathing whatever the newly liberated tailpipes produce, and California regulators, whose authority to keep the nation's air cleaner than the federal minimum the order is built to dismantle.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment