Will Trump Kneecap The EPA?

“What they do is a disgrace,” he once told Fox News, and his appointee as EPA administrator was the attorney general of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt, who cemented a reputation as one of the most outspoken opponents of EPA regulation in the nation. But six months in, a client alert from Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick finds something less than a decimation of the agency, so far. Early in his term President Trump proposed to cut the EPA by 31 percent and lay off a quarter of the agency’s employees, but the recent budget trimmed only $208 million out of $8.2 billion the EPA requested for fiscal 2017, “so at least in the short term, there will be no drastic cuts to U.S. EPA as proposed by President Trump,” according to the post. In other respects, however, it notes an attack of sorts is on. Trump has issued far fewer EPA Federal Register Filings than any of the previous three Presidents and has issued numerous executive orders that undercut Obama-era EPA actions. Pruitt, meanwhile, has delayed some regulations that were on track before the election, although not without pushback from courts, notably a recent finding by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that vacated a stay of the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for fugitive emissions of methane and other pollutants by the oil and natural gas industries. “Deregulating U.S. EPA may be a priority for President Trump but it will not be easy,” this post concludes. “Citizen suits and mounting litigation will slow any attempt to streamline U.S. EPA’s regulations.”