Obama grew increasingly comfortable with power
President got results by using executive actions
WASHINGTON — In nearly eight years in office, President Barack Obama has sought to reshape the nation with a sweeping assertion of executive authority and a canon of regulations that has inserted the U.S. government more deeply into American life.
Once a presidential candidate with deep misgivings about executive power, Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history.
Blocked for most of his presidency by Congress, Obama has sought to act however he could. In the process, he created the kind of government neither he nor the
Republicans wanted — one that depended on bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency. But once Obama got the taste for it, he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.
The Obama administration in its first seven years finalized 560 major regulations — those classified by the Congressional Budget Office as having particularly significant economic or social impacts. That was nearly 50 percent more than the George W. Bush administration during the comparable period, according to data kept by the regulatory studies center at George Washington University.
The administration’s regulatory legacy has become an issue in the campaign to replace Obama, as Donald Trump has sharply criticized regulatory overreach and promised to undo many of the new rules. But executive power has expanded steadily under both Republican and Democratic presidents in recent decades, and both Trump and Hillary Clinton have promised to act in the service of their own goals.
The new rules built on the legislative victories Obama won during his first two years in office. Those laws — the Affordable Care Act, the DoddFrank Act and the $800 billion economic stimulus package — transformed the nation’s health care system, curbed the ambitions of the big banks and injected financial support into a creaky economy. But as Republicans increased their control of Capitol Hill, Obama’s deep frustration with congressional opposition led to a new approach: He gradually embraced a president’s power to act unilaterally.
Kate Hanni, an advocate from Napa, California, for the rights of airline passengers, had tried for years to persuade the government to address a series of incidents in which flight delays left passengers trapped for hours on planes that had already left the gate, often in cabins with stinking toilets, weak air-conditioning and no food. The Bush administration put Hanni on a task force consisting mostly of airline executives, which concluded — over her forceful and repeated objections — that the public was best served by allowing the airlines to make their own decisions.
Weeks after the task force released its report, Hanni was invited to Washington in December 2008 to meet with Robert S. Rivkin, the head of Obama’s transportation transition team. Democrats in Congress had introduced legislation to address the issue, but Rivkin asked Hanni if she would support new regulations instead. She would back anything enforceable, Hanni said.
“Right answer,” he replied.
Over the course of the next nine months, Rivkin and his team of career regulators at the Department of Transportation developed rules prohibiting planes loaded with passengers from sitting on the tarmac for more than three hours.
In May 2009, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, raised concerns about Janice Langbehn, a social worker featured in The New York Times who was barred from visiting her hospitalized same-sex partner.
Passing legislation to address the problem was unlikely, Emanuel knew, given entrenched ideological opposition and the White House’s focus on overhauling the health insurance system.
A year later, the president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to develop regulations requiring hospitals to extend visitation rights to same-sex partners. A focus on similar issues produced more than 100 executive actions and regulatory changes intended to improve the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
A White House push to pass a sweeping climate change bill in 2009 failed in Congress, but almost from the outset, some of Obama’s aides were working on a Plan B. An internal task force began working to put a dollar figure on the cost of carbon emissions.
In 2010, the administration issued a report that estimated the economic impact of global warming, including agricultural disruptions, increased flooding and health problems. It pegged the cost of carbon emissions at $21 per ton. An updated assessment in 2013 raised the price tag to $33.
When the administration announced stricter standards for automobile fuel efficiency in 2011, it cited the reduction in carbon emissions as a key benefit. Those benefits have since been cited in several dozen new regulations, including the hotly debated 2015 rule seeking to restrict emissions from new power plants.