In a political stunt Thursday from the Roosevelt Room at the White House, P&#@*&^%t Trump announced that he wants to cut federal regulations back to where they were in 1960. That’s 185,000 pages in 2017 vs. 20,000 pages 57 years ago, according to the White House. This announcement no doubt brought big smiles to certain barons of industry who have already toasted the regime’s trashing of regulations that began practically the minute the man first sat in the big chair in the Oval Office.
If you’re old enough, or have read a bit of history on the subject, you may remember that in 1960 there was no Clean Air Act, no Occupational Safety and Health Administration, no Environmental Protection Agency, no Mine Safety and Health Administration, a highly limited Clean Water Act, no Department of Energy, no Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, no Office of Energy & Renewable Energy, no Commodity Futures Trading Commission, no Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, no Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And then there’s the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.
About the only surprise is that Trump didn’t say 1930 instead of 1960. Then he could also have lopped off regulations developed by the Securities & Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Soil Conservation Service. Give him a second term and he’ll skeletonize those as well. Eric Lipton and Michael Tackett report:
The president said that for every new regulation adopted, his administration has killed 22, a claim that some experts in regulation said was difficult to verify, but which he said was far more than the two rules killed for each new one that he pledged earlier this year.
The president also said little about the impact of his actions, which have created opportunities for regulated industries that supported his campaign — and that in many cases have played a direct a role in orchestrating the changes through their lobbying efforts.
In no part of government have the consequences of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the actions of the Obama administration been more apparent than in the Environmental Protection Agency. But the reach of the actions were pronounced even on Thursday, when the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal Obama era regulations known as net neutrality, which prohibit internet service providers from blocking or charging websites for higher-quality service.
The reporters note that Trump’s actions on the regulatory front “is building business confidence and accelerating economic growth.” Well, of course. Killing regulations that protect health, safety, the environment, and honest economic interactions would surely be a boon to the bottom line. No matter to them that killing the regulations would also mean, in many instances, killing lots of Americans. Just the price to be paid for growing the economy.
Combine the regime’s efforts to eliminate regulations with its lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, and you have a perfect deadly storm.
Fortunately, there’s been considerable pushback from the states, particularly attorneys general. One of those is Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California who has sued the feds seven times over what he and some other attorneys general view as illegal delays or rollbacks of regulations. The latest suit, filed Thursday, says the Department of Education is illegally delaying the Borrowers Defense Rule, an Obama-era regulation that allows for loan forgiveness for students if they were defrauded or misled by their college:
“It is a mirage more than a miracle,” Mr. Becerra said Thursday in an interview, referring to the benefits to American society that Mr. Trump said have been gained by the regulatory rollbacks. “Where these rollbacks might succeed, it will be at the expense of college students who are trying to get a real degree and not a sham degree and don’t want to see their student loan debt increase because they have been defrauded.”
For rank-and-file Americans, the benefits of all these delays and axings are a mirage. But not for the 21st Century robber barons who would like to see a rollback of regulations all the way to the Gilded Age, c. 1890. Fools, rogues, and rip-off artists call those the good old days.