President Trump’s energy deregulation could be at the mercy of a Democratic successor or simply stall out if the administration does not rush to shore it up this year, his top former energy advisers warn.
The administration is “running up against the problem that the majority of the deregulatory rules will not be final and fully litigated before the end of the first Trump term,” said Myron Ebell, the president’s former Environmental Protection Agency transition official. “And that means if President Trump is not re-elected, the next president can undo them much more quickly than he would otherwise be able to do if they were final and had been litigated.”
Ebell, who leads the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute’s environmental arm, was in charge of rerouting the EPA from the previous administration’s agenda to that of President Trump. He was integral in turning the president’s campaign promises into recommendations that made up Trump’s rollback of former President Obama’s climate regulations and other environmental rules.
But Ebell said that the administration hasn’t implemented the agenda fast enough, and that it has taken EPA two years to accomplish what should have taken it one year.
Part of the reason for the lag is that former EPA head Scott Pruitt was left alone to manage the duties of the agency after being confirmed. It took over a year for the Senate to confirm many of Pruitt’s key deputies, which made it harder for him to implement a deregulatory strategy more quickly.
For instance, Pruitt only got Senate confirmation for his deputy administrator at the agency last April, only a few months before Pruitt resigned amid scandals involving misappropriation of funds and ethics rule violations. The No. 2 official was Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist seen as a skilled administrator of the kind Pruitt badly needed to carry out his agenda.
Wheeler subsequently replaced Pruitt, but he doesn’t have much time left on the clock to make sure the changes stick.
“This is a critical year to get some of these really important regulations at least finalized, so they can get into the courts, and we can get that process moving,” said Tom Pyle, the president of the free market American Energy Alliance, who served as Trump’s transition chief for the Energy Department.
[Related: Inside Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance 2.0’ agenda]
The administration is expected to face massive legal pushback on most of its environmental rule rollbacks and its replacements for Obama policies such as the Clean Power Plan that sought to lower emissions from power plants, and the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, standards for lowering emissions and improving fuel efficiency from cars and light trucks.
The success of the CAFE rewrite is particularly consequential, Pyle said, because the administration has to “resolve, one way or another, whether or not the state of California is going to be able to dictate environmental protection for the rest of the country.”
The Trump administration had recently ended negotiations with California over EPA’s new proposal for one national vehicle standard, which would mean states would no longer have the choice between abiding by California’s more stringent regulations or federal rules. Pyle said allowing California to continue with its program will lead to less consumer choice and more expensive vehicles across the country. California is vowing a protracted legal battle over Trump’s proposal.
Pyle also said the president has been too soft on Congress and has not wielded his veto power effectively enough to initiate much-needed reforms at the Department of Energy.
“He’s got a lot on his plate, I don’t blame him, but if the president focused more on trying to force his budget on the Congress as opposed to just taking whatever Congress sent him, he could have some leverage in that process,” Pyle said.
Trump’s budget proposals have called for sweeping cuts at EPA and DOE, but he hasn’t been able to get Congress to follow through.
[Also read: Trump’s energy budget makes coal and nuclear a priority over renewables]
Trump has taken too long to figure out that, although the Republican leadership talks as though they support his agenda, there is a very large part that either doesn’t support it or actively opposes it, said Ebell.
“He would have figured that out much more quickly if he had vetoed the first spending bill,” he added.
Ebell said the president can pursue as many deregulatory policies as he likes via rule-making, but to make them permanent, he has to shrink the agencies. “If you want less regulation, you’re going to have to have fewer regulators,” Ebell said.
The first budget Trump sent to Congress proposed a 31 percent cut at EPA. But the Republican-controlled Congress only gave the EPA a 6 percent budget cut. Ebell said he should have vetoed the bill that funded the agency and demanded a bigger cut.
Trump’s newly proposed fiscal 2020 budget asks for the same 31 percent cut, making it the third time he’s asked that major cuts be made to the agency.
The DOE is also facing steep cuts in Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget, including the elimination of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, which the president also proposed to eliminate in his previous two budgets. Each time the president has zeroed out the budget for ARPA-E, Congress has opposed his recommendation by keeping funding in place.
Other energy programs at the agency will likely be spared, too. The reason there is such strong support for the DOE budget is due to the “pork” spending that the agency funnels back into lawmakers’ districts, said Pyle.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has done a good job of promoting the president’s energy dominance agenda and natural gas exports, but he has for the most part gone along with Congress on spending priorities, Pyle said.
“So, unfortunately, the bold reforms that we proposed, which are reflected in the president’s budget submittals, hasn’t come to fruition,” he said.
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