Donald Trump and Republicans have promised to roll back the Biden administration’s aggressive environmental regulations, repeal landmark pieces of legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and fire longtime civil servants.
Lobbyists, experts and former Trump administration officials told NOTUS that they expect these changes to be top priorities come January. Trump, they said, will easily thwart Democrats’ efforts to safeguard against a radical reshaping of the executive branch.
“The new Trump administration will have the chance to finish off some of the things they tried to do the first time,” said Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. “People are aware of the problems that existed last time. I think that they will be better able to hit the ground running and start achieving their objectives.”
Trump blamed longtime agency staff for slow-walking his regulatory reform efforts during his first term. During his last year in office, he tried to institute an executive order that would reclassify civil servants as akin to political appointees to make it easier to fire them. Though the Biden administration immediately rescinded that order — called Schedule F — Trump promised on the campaign trail to reinstate it on the first day of his administration.
Over the last year, conservative groups like the America First Policy Institute and the American Accountability Foundation have tried to enable this staffing overhaul. Some groups have been compiling lists of civil servants for possible firing and running recruitment and training for new agency, Hill and White House staffers.
While the Biden administration has since tried to make it difficult for a future administration to implement Schedule F by finalizing rules that reinforce merit-based oversight for civil service workers, employment experts seem skeptical that the effort will succeed.
Should Trump’s allies end up in the administration, they have pledged to gut the staff in specific agencies. On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed cutting entire departments of the Food and Drug Administration. Elon Musk has proposed to cut huge swaths of agency budgets through some type of efficiency commission. Last week, former EPA administrator Mandy Gunasekara said the EPA needed to be torn down and rebuilt.
The EPA has been a frequent and special target on the campaign trail.
Many of the Biden administration’s biggest regulations were environmental, including a vehicle emissions rule that Trump has excoriated as an “EV mandate.” That rule, as well as rules governing power plant emissions and mercury and air pollutants, are likely to be among the first that the Trump administration will start trying to roll back, according to Thomas Lorenzen, a former Department of Justice attorney responsible for defending the EPA.
It should be easier for those rollback efforts to succeed, even with outside groups mounting the robust challenges that caused problems for Trump’s first term, Lorenzen said. In his first term, Trump had a significantly lower success rate with regulatory change compared to the administrations that came before him.
“Last time around, the Trump administration rushed out a lot of its deregulatory actions with very little thought for legal or factual analysis, and those efforts were met by a fairly hostile federal judiciary,” he said.
But with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end decades of Chevron deference, which required courts to give preference to how agencies chose to interpret a law, “that could provide a lot of assistance to a Trump administration that is intent on deregulation,” he said.
It’s not just environmental rules that will face the hammer. Complex regulations that govern how American companies do business elsewhere are among the many rules likely to go, according to Sarah Bauerle Danzman, a former investment policy adviser to the State Department.
“I think that is one of the main reasons why a surprising number of people in the business community decided to back Trump this time, is because they viewed it as a way of unwinding a lot of these regulations that have gotten more complicated and that limit their ability to do business,” she said, citing Musk’s many financial interests abroad as one example.
Trump will have to take more time and effort to remove rules than he did for many the last time around. During his first term, Congress and the White House made unprecedented use of a law called the Congressional Review Act, using it to toss a multitude of rules. The Biden administration intentionally finalized regulations early enough that the Congressional Review Act cannot be used in the same way.
Rolling back those finalized rules will require a new period of drafting, notice and comment, and the administration will need to justify why it is changing them.
But many of the rules that the Trump administration will likely roll back are already facing legal challenges from a wide range of interest groups, and Lorenzen expects that Trump’s attorneys will request those cases be put on hold so that the administration does not have to defend them while they begin to craft new rules. (Lorenzen represents some of the plaintiffs suing to throw out the Biden administration’s clean power plant rule.)
The administration can use this tactic in many situations: For example, last week, the town of Ocean City, Maryland, sued to stop the approval of a massive offshore wind project. The administration could choose not to defend the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval decision for that wind project — a tactic that Paul Pinsky, the director of Maryland’s Energy administration, suggested played a part in the timing of that lawsuit’s filing.
Trump has said he will end permitting for offshore wind projects immediately upon taking office. By not defending the BOEM approval, Trump could perhaps prevent that offshore wind farm from being built.
“He could abuse the system and abuse states’ rights and really unilaterally make decisions about energy supplies that are not grounded in economic or national security merits,” Nick Loris, the vice president of public policy at the conservative climate think tank C3 Solutions, said. “That’s perhaps the worst-case scenario, but there was talk of that beforehand.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.