Our newly inaugurated president has vowed to repeal 75 percent of all federal regulations, you know those regulations that protect our air, water, food we eat, drugs we take, etc. As a first step, he release an Executive Edict mandating that federal agencies shall repeal two regulations for each new rule they issue. That however, was a step too far for a number of organizations.
Public Citizen, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), have now filed a lawsuit arguing that the president has exceeded his authority under the US Constitution. They also argue that the president’s edict considers only costs and blocks consideration of benefits associated with respect to important health, safety and environmental protections.
Here’s what you need to know about the case:
- In a unilateral directive issued in just his second week in office, Trump’s edict essentially ordered the government to stop issuing new health and safety, financial, environmental, workplace and other vital public protections.
- Trump’s edict will allow Big Business to exploit workers, Wall Street to rip off consumers, Dirty Energy companies to pollute, Big Pharma to continue price gouging, auto makers to sell dangerous cars, and on and on.
- It will be nearly impossible for the government to carry out its duties under popular and effective laws like the Clean Air Act, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, to name a few.
- Even after the Wall Street crash, the BP oil disaster and other failures that resulted from letting corporations “regulate” themselves, the American people will be forced to suffer still MORE corporate recklessness and greed.
- The edict requires that for every new regulation adopted, two must be eliminated — a nonsensical standard with absolutely no basis in law.
- Especially insidious in his edict is that regulations must be evaluated only by inflating estimates of their cost to businesses while completely ignoring their substantially greater — and real — benefits to society.
- This edict will mean more contaminated food, an accelerated rush to climate catastrophe, more dangerous cars and trucks, more workplace injuries and deaths, slashed consumer rights, more oil spills, more human misery. All unnecessary. All preventable.
The lawsuit takes direct aim at putting corporate profits before people’s lives and the public good.
“Workers shouldn’t be required to trade off one set of job, health and safety protections in order to get protection from another equally dangerous condition. Technically, this order means that the asbestos workplace standard, for example, could be discarded in order to adopt safeguards for nurses from infectious diseases in their workplaces” — CWA president, Chris Shelton
“No one thinking sensibly about how to set rules for health, safety, the environment, and the economy would ever adopt the Trump executive order approach—unless their only goal was to confer enormous benefits on big business. By irrationally directing agencies to consider costs but not benefits of new rules, it would fundamentally change our government’s role from one of protecting the public to protecting corporate profits.” — Public Citizen president Robert Weissman
“Trump’s order would deny Americans the basic protections they rightly expect. New efforts to stop pollution don’t automatically make old ones unnecessary. When you make policy by tweet, it yields irrational rules. This order imposes a false choice between clean air, clean water, safe food, and other environmental safeguards.” — NRDC president Rhea Suh