President Trump signed an order Monday aimed at cutting regulations on businesses, saying that agencies should eliminate two regulations for each new one.
The White House later released the text of the order, which added that the cost of any new regulation should be offset by eliminating regulations with the same costs to businesses. It excluded regulations regarding the military.
The impact of the order was difficult to judge based on the president's remarks. It could be difficult to implement under current law and would concentrate greater power in the Office of Management and Budget, which already reviews federal regulations. And it would add a new time-consuming requirement for any new congressional legislation on topics as varied as banking, health care, environment, labor conditions and more.
Trump signed the document — which he called "a big one" — at his desk in the Oval Office surrounded by nine small-business owners, who earlier this morning met in the Roosevelt Room.
"This will be the largest ever cut by far in terms of regulations," Trump said. "If you have a regulation you want, number one we're not going to approve it because it's already been approved probably in 17 different forms. But if we do, the only way you have a chance is we have to knock out two regulations for every new regulation. So if there's a new regulation, they have to knock out two. But it goes way beyond that."
But experts on government policy said Trump's formulation made little sense. "There's no logic to this," William Gale, a tax and fiscal policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said before seeing the executive order. "The number of regulations is not the key. It's how onerous regulations are. This seems like a totally nonsensical constraint to me."
Moreover, many departments impost regulations that have costs for businesses but benefits for individuals.
Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the executive order "absurd, imposing a Sophie's Choice on federal agencies. If, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to issue a new rule to protect kids from mercury exposure, will it need to get rid of two other science-based rules, such as limiting lead in drinking water and cutting pollution from school buses?"
Kimmell added that Trump's order was "also likely illegal. Congress has not called upon EPA to choose between clean air and clean water, and the president cannot do this by executive fiat."
Jim Tozzi, a former head of OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and now head of the non-governmental Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, said that Trump's proposal "is going to be a lot of analytical work. It is not a trivial undertaking at all." He said existing regulations, many of them quite old, may have costs much different from the original estimates. Updating those estimates would be "a huge undertaking," he said. Tozzi favors a federal budget for new regulations alone.
Trump said the move would help both large and small businesses. "Regulation has been horrible for big business, but it's been worse for small business," he said, noting that small businesses cannot hire the talent and compliance personnel that larger businesses do.
"There will be regulation, there will be control, but it will be a normalized control where you can open your business and expand your business very easily and that's what our country has been all about," Trump said. He said he hoped to eliminate 75 percent of government regulations.
Administration members who attended the signing included White House Counsel Donald McGhan; Chief of Staff Reince Priebus; senior adviser Jared Kushner; Domestic Policy Council Director Andrew Bremberg; and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn.
More from Energy and Environment:
Trump administration backs off plan to scrub climate pages from EPA website
Trump might revisit environmental rules going back decades, transition adviser says
Reports on climate change have disappeared from the State Department website
No comments:
Post a Comment