Trump’s deregulation an 11th-hour poison pill

Don’t believe the hype. President Donald Trump’s lastminute flurry of (de)regulations will not help the economy. But then, they were never really meant to.

For the past four years, the Trump administration has claimed, without evidence, that its deregulatory agenda has turbocharged economic growth.

And for four years, surrogates and lazy pundits have repeated this false claim.

They could have simply looked at pre-pandemic trends in, say, gross domestic product growth or hiring and noticed that Trump’s record was nearly identical to President Barack Obama’s. This is despite Obama’s alleged reputation as a job-killing, overtaxing hyper-regulator, and Trump’s as the savior who liberated the economy from Obama.

Or perhaps commentators could have examined what Trump’s deregulations did and whether it’s remotely plausible these magic beans could sprout a macroeconomic beanstalk.

So let’s consider some of the record number of “midnight regulations” the Trump administration is jamming through on its way out the door.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an interim decision allowing farmers to use a pesticide linked with brain damage in children. It’s hard to argue with a straight face that more childhood brain damage is good for either children or the economy they may someday contribute to.

A few days later, the EPA finalized a rule rejecting tougher standards on soot, which is emitted by industrial operations, vehicle exhaust, smokestacks and other sources. This deadly air pollutant is linked to asthma, heart attacks and other illnesses.

On Wednesday, the EPA finalized a “meta” rule of sorts: one designed to make it harder to issue new clean-air safeguards in the future. It achieves this by rigging the accounting in the cost-benefit analyses required to justify new rules — specifically, by forbidding the agency from counting huge categories of benefits, while still counting all the costs.

This kind of gives away the game. Of course it’s easier to claim that allowing more pollution is good for the economy if you make it a policy to ignore evidence that suggests otherwise.

These are just some of the more than 125 environmental safeguards the Trump administration has been rolling back. More last-minute, pro-pollution EPA rules are expected in the next week; that way, they might be able to legally take effect before Joe Biden becomes president, according to an internal agency email obtained by E&E News.

Other agencies, meanwhile, are rushing to finish up their own 11th-hour poison-pill regulations.

Some would curb visas for international students (whose education-related travel contributed about $44 billion to the U.S. economy last year) and other legal immigrants. Another would force virtually all existing Medicaid

regulations to automatically expire unless re-reviewed by government health officials, who would have to spend all their time making sure the system doesn’t implode. Another would narrow eligibility for food stamps, in the midst of a hunger crisis. Another would allow federally funded homeless shelters to effectively turn away transgender people.

These and other proposed regulatory changes seem more likely to lead to net economic harms. The harms would be disproportionately felt by

Trump’s perceived political enemies: immigrants, poor people, transgender Americans. And apparently, any economic damage they incur doesn’t count. Or perhaps it’s even desired.

Yes, the Biden administration can reverse many of these actions. Some reversals are likely to be slow, however, given the cumbersome legal requirements for issuing new regulations. Courts could intervene as well. Trump officials skipped over some requirements to rush rules through, citing national security and other (seemingly bogus) grounds. This will make these policies even more vulnerable to challenges.

Trump and his underlings know this, of course: They realize their last-minute rule changes will eventually get unwound. But they also know this unwinding process will waste a lot of time, money and government resources.

And hey, what better way to prove you really, truly want to shrink government than by giving it more work to do?

Associated Press file photo The EPA has rejected tougher standards on healthdamaging soot. The Biden administration will have its work cut out for it in undoing last-minute rules like this.

CATHERINE RAMPELL