In recent weeks, Trump has directed federal agencies to withdraw rules and sunset vast swaths of environmental protections. Such moves would mean skipping the usual steps in the process of changing regulations, such as receiving feedback from the public and experts and undergoing a new rulemaking process to change the effective dates for a regulation.
Some legal scholars interviewed by The Hill described the orders as a power grab.
In particular, one presidential order that directed the Energy Department to repeal regulations on showerheads last week contained what scholars characterized as a stunning sentence: “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”
“That is truly an extraordinary assertion of power,” said Max Sarinsky, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school.
Typically, federal regulatory and deregulatory actions have to go through a process known as notice and comment in which agencies propose a rule, allow the public to weigh in and consider making adjustments based on the feedback they receive from the public.
For rules that are particularly controversial, the process normally takes months or years. But within a matter of days after Trump’s order, the Energy Department issued a final rule axing the Biden showerhead regulations.
“The White House is asserting the power, essentially, to regulate or to deregulate by executive order. That is novel,” said Nina Mendelson, a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Meanwhile, Trump also sought to take another regulatory shortcut recently by directing agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Fish and Wildlife Service to “sunset” a wide range of regulations — potentially including those that go back decades.
If the administration seeks to add sunset clauses without analyzing each individual regulation, “we could see, again, a radical reshaping of the regulatory … structure in a very short time,” Mendelson said.
She said, however, that doing so would be “legally dubious.”
Read more at TheHill.com.
