President Trump’s executive order on energy independence reached a crucial first deadline over the weekend for all agencies to report regulations that could hurt energy production from fossil fuels, marking the opening salvo of what is expected to become the Trump energy agenda.
Although he has signed orders to establish task forces to review and dismantle all manner of regulations, his latest energy independence order and another on offshore drilling are probably the most centered on what will become Trump’s environmental and energy policy legacy in the next four years.
The Energy Independence and Economic Growth Executive Order signed March 28 has been given the most attention for beginning the process of rolling back the centerpiece of former President Barack Obama’s climate agenda, the Clean Power Plan.
But it also contains three big deadlines that will make up his regulatory agenda on energy for the rest of the year. The deadlines include:
• An all-hands-on-deck directive for a multiagency energy impact review to be submitted 45 days after the order was signed. That deadline was reached Friday.
The executive order calls for an immediate review of “all agency actions that potentially burden the safe, efficient development of domestic energy resources.”
It requires the heads of agencies to review “all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies and any other similar agency actions (collectively, agency actions) that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources, with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources.”
“What they’re doing is mixing the economics with the danger,” said Jim Ferraro, a lawyer well-known for successfully litigating against chemical giant DuPont. He sees the review process as basically a run around climate change regulations to benefit fossil fuel companies.
It’s meant to judge whether “there is something really here that they consider to be a real hardcore, serious danger that will trump the economics of it or is it … cheaper to sell oil,” Ferraro said.
Each agency will submit its reviews to the White House Office of Management and Budget, Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s economic advisers.
• The second deadline comes 75 days after the first, or 120 days after the order was signed. At that point, the head of each agency must submit a draft final report detailing the actions the agency will take, including specific recommendations, that, “to the extent permitted by law, could alleviate or eliminate aspects of agency actions that burden domestic energy production.”
• The third deadline comes at the 180-day mark, when the recommendations the agencies submitted are finalized into action.
“If you look at everything the administration wants to do on the energy and environment front, and on the regulatory front, I think everyone envisions that it’s going to be a long process that’s not going to end” once the deadlines are met, said Sam Batkins, director of regulation at the free-market American Action Forum.
“All of these are going to have to go through the same notice and comment rulemaking process that the original regulations did in the first place,” he said. “I think the only real difference is that we will have the sense of which regulations and which policies from the previous administration they may want to keep and the ones they want to significantly amend or repeal,” Batkins said.
Based on the executive orders, the administration has made it clear that it wants to rescind the Clean Power Plan. “But pretty much no one predicts resolution of the Clean Power Plan will happen in the first term of this administration,” Batkins said.
Rolling back the “big-ticket” regulations on energy and the environment will take a minimum of four to five years, he said.
What people should expect sooner is a “Unified Agenda” on regulations and deregulation that Batkins said could be compiled as soon as the end of May. The regulatory agenda will show what regulations the administration is targeting, from energy to financial to healthcare, and what rules it supports.
All administrations publish a Unified Agenda that spells out their regulatory agenda, as well as what aspects of regulation it will seek to reform or eliminate. The process was started under former President Ronald Reagan. Trump’s regulatory agenda is different in that it relies heavily on executive orders to guide agencies on the direction regulations should take, which his economic team and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney will be in charge of tracking and compiling into a unified vision for deregulation.
Typically, the White House publishes a Unified Agenda twice a year, in May and October, Batkins said. But they have been known to be as late as July and December.
“If this agenda is published in May, it will be a pretty good indication that things have moved swiftly, and we’ll start to get answers to these questions listed in the executive orders,” he said.
However, Batkins warned that if the Unified Agenda drags out until July, those seeking action sooner on some of the regulations could begin to worry.
The Environmental Protection Agency, for one, is ready to meet the goals set out by the president in the energy executive orders, according to officials with the agency.
Batkins agreed. He said the EPA has the staff in place to get the job done. A number of former staffers in Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe’s office joined the EPA’s policy office soon after Scott Pruitt was confirmed to lead the agency. The policy office is leading the agency’s regulatory reform task force established under another of Trump’s orders.
“Since taking office, the EPA has spearheaded over 22 major regulatory reform actions that includes work on the Clean Power Plan and [Waters of the U.S. Rule], and this is just the beginning of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt’s agenda of protecting the environment and American jobs,” said EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman.
