Trump Unveils Record Plan To Eliminate 702 Federal Rules, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Government Was Still Protecting Americans From The Air, Water, And Workplaces Around Them

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Marking the approach of the nation's 250th birthday with a document that invoked the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration on Friday published a regulatory agenda proposing to eliminate 702 existing federal rules, the largest such purge ever assembled in a single White House plan and roughly twice the number in motion at any given point during the president's first term.

The 702 targeted rules, which arrive on top of 752 rollbacks already finalized since the fiscal year began in October, include environmental review requirements for energy projects, energy efficiency standards for the appliances Americans keep in their homes, and rules promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Officials projected that terminating the regulations would save the economy $1.5 trillion, the bulk of it from repealing the 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, a determination the administration has concluded is costly.

"For too long, the federal government has stood between the American people and the freely flowing benzene, the unlabeled packaging, and the workplace outcomes they have every right to encounter," said a source within the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office now empowered to coordinate rulemaking across dozens of agencies that until the week before had operated independently. "The president believes that if a rule is saving lives, it is by definition costing money."

That expanded reach followed a Supreme Court ruling six days earlier granting the president authority to remove the heads of formerly independent agencies at will, an arrangement that has since required bodies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to route their regulations through the White House budget office. The EEOC has used its new posture to begin scrapping the "disparate impact" standard long relied upon to prove racial discrimination, while the Food and Drug Administration has delayed a rule that would have required food packaging to display more visible nutrient information.

In one of his first orders after returning to office, the president directed every agency to repeal ten regulations for each new one it issued, a ratio a White House official said the agenda was on track to satisfy by the end of September. Left uncounted in the $1.5 trillion figure, critics noted, were the benefits of the rules themselves, among them the share of Americans who might otherwise have continued breathing, drinking, eating, and earning under federal supervision.

At press time, the administration had proposed three brand-new regulations of its own, each designed to deny federal benefits to undocumented immigrants, expand background checks on foreign nationals working in transportation, and otherwise confirm that the government retained a full capacity to write rules whenever it wished to restrict someone.

Who Benefits

§President Trump, whose White House now channels the entire regulatory agenda and, following the June 29 Supreme Court ruling, extends his authority over agencies Congress deliberately built to be independent of him.
§Oil, gas, and coal producers, for whom repealing the 2009 endangerment finding removes the legal basis for regulating the greenhouse gases their operations emit, accounting for most of the plan's claimed $1.5 trillion in savings.
§Automakers and appliance manufacturers, freed by the elimination of fuel economy and energy efficiency standards to build cheaper products whose higher running costs are passed to consumers.
§Energy developers, who under the waived environmental review requirements may advance pipelines, drilling, and power projects without the studies that once flagged risks to the people living nearby.
§Employers accused of discrimination, for whom the EEOC's retreat from the disparate impact standard makes racial bias substantially harder to prove.
§Food and packaging companies, spared by the FDA's delay from printing the clearer nutrient information consumers might have used.
§The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which gathers rulemaking authority over dozens of previously independent agencies into a single office reporting to the president.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment