Overnight Regulation: EPA to repeal landmark Obama climate rule | Jones Act waiver expires | Puerto Rico gov asks Congress for more aid | Trump to roll back health insurance regs
Welcome to Overnight Regulation, your daily rundown of news from the federal agencies, Capitol Hill, the courts and beyond. It’s Monday evening, and the House is headed back to town after the Columbus Day weekend. The Senate is out this week.
THE BIG STORY
The Trump administration on Tuesday will formally propose repealing former President Obama’s landmark climate change rule for power plants, a key part of the U.S. commitment to reduce emissions under the Paris climate accords.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt told a Kentucky audience on Monday that he will sign paperwork on Tuesday to repeal the rule, which he argued exceeded the previous administration’s authority and treated coal communities unfairly.
“The Clean Power Plan, it wasn’t about regulating to make things regular,” Pruitt said at an event with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to raucous applause. “It was truly about regulating to pick winners and losers.”
Pruitt gave his remarks at a mining and construction equipment business, in the heart of Eastern Kentucky’s hard-hit coal country.
President Trump has long promised to end “the war on coal.”
Get the details from Timothy Cama and Devin Henry right here.
PLUS: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) said Monday he will sue the Trump administration over its decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan.
ON TAP FOR TUESDAY
American Enterprise Institute event: Welfare policy and the Trump administration: What do conservatives think?
REGULATORY ROUNDUP
Jones Act: The White House has let a 10-day waiver of the shipping rule expire for Puerto Rico, meaning foreign ships can no longer bring aid to the hurricane-ravaged island from U.S. ports.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirmed on Monday that the Jones Act waiver, which expired on Sunday, will not be extended.
U.S. lawmakers and Puerto Rican officials had been pushing the administration for an exemption from the Jones Act, a century-old law that only allows American-built and -operated vessels to make cargo shipments between U.S. ports.
The Hill’s Melanie Zanona reports.
Puerto Rico aid: Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is asking Congress to consider providing about $1.4 billion in funding beyond the Trump administration’s request last week to help the U.S. territory recover from Hurricane Maria.
In a letter made public on Monday to House and Senate leaders, Rosselló requested funding for federal grant and loan programs “to meet the immediate emergency needs of Puerto Rico.”
Rosselló’s request includes $3.2 million for Community Development Block Grants, $500 million for the Community Disaster Loan Program, $500 million for the Social Services Block Grant, $149 million for the Emergency Relief Program, $90 million for the Disaster Loan Program, $83 million for the Commodity Assistance Program and $78 million for the State Educational Agencies and Hurricane Education Recovery.
Read more from The Hill’s Cristina Marcos.
Health care: President Trump will sign an executive order next week aimed at rolling back health insurance regulations put in place by former President Obama in an effort to undo his predecessor’s signature health-care law, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The order will reportedly direct the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and Treasury to make it easier for individuals to group together and purchase insurance through “association health plans.”
The president also directs the agencies to roll back the Obama administration regulations of “short-term medical insurance,” which is a cheap limited-protection option that the former administration claimed did not provide adequate coverage for individuals.
The regulation requiring insurance plans to cover a set of package benefits will also be rolled back, according to the Journal.
Gun control: Not everyone is fully on board with banning bump stocks, even as GOP leadership and the NRA have expressed openness.
Rep. Scott Taylor (R-Va.) in an interview broadcast Sunday said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) should re-evaluate bump stocks in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Las Vegas.
“I think that should be re-evaluated,” Taylor told ABC News’s “This Week” during an interview focusing on gun legislation with Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.).
“I’m not willing to impede on someone’s rights just because of emotional rhetoric,” Taylor added in the interview.
The conversation between the two congressmen comes amid an ongoing debate on the bump-stock devices, which were found in the hotel room of the Las Vegas shooter after the attack. The device can be used to increase the rate of fire in semi-automatic weapons.
Immigration: IBM is making an aggressive push for legislation that would help recipients of Deferred Action For Childhood (DACA), an Obama-era program that let almost 700,000 undocumented individuals who were brought to the country as minors stay and work in the U.S.
Chris Padilla, vice president for the government and regulatory affairs at IBM, told The Hill that the company believes Congress can pass bipartisan legislation that would enshrine DACA policy into law by the end of the year.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at the beginning of September that the Trump administration would make moves to rescind DACA. The program is set to expire in March. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by then, it would be possible for U.S. immigration officers to deport the almost 700,000 so-called Dreamers — undocumented individuals who benefitted from the program — to the countries they were brought from.
Padilla said he thinks DACA provisions for Dreamers could be included as a part of a bipartisan fiscal package that Congress is trying to pass by the end of the 2017 legislative session.
Get the story from The Hill’s Ali Breland.
Tax reform: The Republican tax reform plan would only increase economic growth by 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points over the next two years, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis, a far cry from the massive boost Republicans say would pay for their tax cuts.
“Our analysis suggests that the ‘dynamic’ cost of the tax cuts is about 20 percent lower than the ‘static’ cost, consistent with the implications of the academic literature,” the bank wrote in a Saturday report.
Republicans have argued that the $1.5 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts, measured by a “static” score that does not include the effects of economic growth, would largely pay for itself once the growth factors were considered in a “dynamic” analysis.
Read more from The Hill’s Niv Elis.
ALSO IN THE NEWS
Five things to know about GOP’s gun-suppressor bill
Waymo, safety groups launch campaign for self-driving cars (CNBC)
Secrecy around air pollution controls in cars faces legal challenge (The Guardian)
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