Awaiting Trump, agencies brace for freeze on regulations

President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to freeze the regulatory work of federal agencies come Jan. 20 has liberal advocates and federal employees on edge.

On the campaign trail, Trump called for a moratorium on new rules and pledged to gut regulations, claiming that 70 percent “could go.”

He’s tempered that rhetoric a bit since the election, saying his plan for his first 100 days is to create a two-for-one requirement — for every new rule issued, two existing rules must be eliminated.

But his pick of fast-food CEO Andy Puzder to head the Department of Labor and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency have groups bracing for a battle over public health and worker protections.

{mosads}“We’ve not seen an administration so committed to devolution and deregulation since the Reagan administration,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group.

“This is unprecedented.”

Business groups, meanwhile, have long complained of red tape from Washington and are ready for the Trump administration to roll back the Obama regulatory regime. They say it’s time to unwind rules put in place over the past eight years that have burdened businesses and slowed economic growth.

“The power of these agencies has seen unbridled growth over the last eight years,” Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, wrote in a post on the group’s website earlier this week titled “Fighting Government’s Fourth Branch.”

“With the new administration and Congress, we have an extraordinary opportunity to reverse that growth and modernize the entire regulatory system.”

One of the biggest battlegrounds on the regulatory front under Trump will be the EPA, which put in place a series of rules under Obama aimed at fighting climate change.

Pruitt has spent much of his time in office fighting the environmental rules that have come from the very agency he’s been tapped to lead. The lawsuits he’s led include challenges to Obama’s climate rule for power plants and restrictions for methane emissions.

“I think President-elect Trump has vowed to dismantle the EPA, and he’s clearly picked the right guy for the job,” Faber said.

The transition has civil servants in the department nervous.

“I have a certain amount of anxiety or worry about what the future might bring,” said an EPA employee, who agreed to speak with The Hill on the condition of anonymity.

“I think it’s challenging to know what things will look like here in the Trump administration.”

Adding to the anxiety, Trump’s transition team last week reportedly surveyed Department of Energy employees to find out who has attended United Nations climate events and who worked on certain agency initiatives under Obama. The transition also asked what openings might be filled before Inauguration Day.

The EPA source said employees there haven’t seen anything similar circulate around the EPA.

Government employees on the whole are seen as more aligned with Democrats.

Of the $2 million that federal employees donated to presidential campaigns, 95 percent went to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to an October analysis by The Hill.

The employee said they know of one person who is leaving because they don’t want to see the work they’ve done over the last eight years repealed by Trump, though there hasn’t been an exodus yet.

“I think a lot of people are taking a wait-and-see approach,” the employee said.

“I think any of my worry is around making sure public health is still protected and protections on water quality and air pollution and efforts on climate change can still move forward and the public can still reap the benefits of these rules. In all economic analyses done of these rules, there are net positives for the American people.”

There’s plenty of precedent for Trump to put in place a regulatory freeze after taking office.

When President Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, he had his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, send a letter to the federal agencies telling them to refrain from sending any new or proposed rules to the Federal Register.

The agencies were told to withdraw any rulemakings that had not yet been published and consider extending by 60 days the effective date of those rules that had already been published.

“It is important President Obama’s appointees and designees have the opportunity to review and approve any new or pending regulations,” Emanuel’s letter said.

Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the conservative American Action Forum, said he is certain Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, will send a similar letter.

“I think they’ll do largely what Obama did, which wasn’t necessarily a drastic move,” he said.

“For major regulations or economically significant regulations, I could see a several month freeze, which isn’t unprecedented.”

Obama withdrew 11 economically significant rulemakings — those which carry an economic cost of $100 million or more — in his first two months in office, while President George W. Bush withdrew 17 economically significant rules, according to an online search of White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs regulatory reviews.

Regulations that have already taken effect will take time for the Trump administration to reverse, experts say.

Ken Kopocis, EPA’s former deputy assistant administrator for water, noted that the only way to roll back regulations that have been finalized is to do another rulemaking, with several required steps under the law.

“A regulatory freeze actually keeps in place everything from the previous administration, so there’s a bit of irony,” he said.

Kopocis, who retired last year, was nominated by Obama to be the assistant administrator of the Office of Water, but Senate Republicans opposed to the Waters of the U.S. rule blocked his nomination. 

He maintains that the rules he worked on during his time at the agency were based on sound science.

“If the next administration wants to undo them, they will have to go through a notice and comment rulemaking and they will have to have a sound basis for changing their mind,” he said.

“This is not a simple task. You can’t say there’s a new person heading the EPA so these rules are repealed. They will be sued on that and they’ll lose.”

Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Division, said there are other ways the Trump administration could grind agency action to halt without a regulatory freeze.  

She said the administration can chose not to enforce certain rules or defend them in court. There’s also the threat of the Congressional Review Act, which gives lawmakers 60 days to repeal a rule after it’s been finalized. 

“There are a lot of tools in their toolkit,” she said.