Administration’s flurry of deregulation rules are poison pill

Don’t believe the hype. President Donald Trump’s last-minute 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 that 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.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued an interim decision allowing farmers to use a pesticide linked with brain damage in children. Sure, if you’re one of the few companies whose business model depends on poisoning kids, I get how this is good for you. But as a macro matter, 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 with asthma, heart attacks and other illnesses, including covid-19. EPA scientists have noted that these fine particle emissions disproportionately harm low-income and minority communities, and in a draft report last year agency, scientists cited evidence that modestly tightening the standards could save thousands or even tens of thousands of lives per year.

But no matter, big polluters gotta keep polluting — because growth. Or something.

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 costbenefit analyses required to justify new rules — specifically, by forbidding the agency from counting huge categories of benefits, while still counting all the costs.

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 various other legal immigrants. Another would force virtually all existing Medicaid regulations to automatically expire unless re-reviewed by government health officials, who would therefore have to spend all their time making sure the system doesn’t accidentally implode. Yet 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.

Yes, the incoming 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.

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?