11/19/20
BILLINGS, MONT. — Down to its final weeks, the Trump administration is working to push through dozens of environmental rollbacks that could weaken century-old protections for migratory birds, expand Arctic drilling and hamstring future regulation of public health threats. The pending changes, which benefit oil and gas and other industries, deepen the challenges for President-elect Joe Biden, who made restoring and advancing protections for the environment, climate and public health a core piece of his campaign. “We’re going to see a real scorched-earth effort here at the tail end of the administration,” said Brian Rutledge, a vice president at the National Audubon Society. The proposed changes cap four years of unprecedented environmental deregulation by President Donald Trump, whose administration has worked to fundamentally change how federal agencies apply and enforce the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and other protections. Most of the changes are expected to sail through the approval process, which includes the White House releasing the final version and publication in the Federal Register. Some decisions, if they go into effect, will be easy for Biden to simply reverse. He already has pledged to return the United States to the Paris climate accord as a first step in his own $2 trillion climate plan. But he faces years of work in court and within agencies to repair major Trump cuts to the nation’s framework of environmental protections.
Earlier moves by the Trump administration, which are now facing court challenges, remove protections for millions of miles of waterways and wetlands, narrow protections for wildlife species facing extinction and open more of the hundreds of millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling. Asked about the push now, as Trump and many of his supporters continue to deny his election loss, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman James Hewitt said, “EPA continues to advance this administration’s commitment to meaningful environmental progress while moving forward with our regulatory reform agenda.” environmentalists and some former federal officials said the actions being taken in Trump’s final days reflect a pro-industry agenda taken to the extreme, in disregard for imperiled wildlife, climate change and damage to human health from air pollution. “What we’re seeing at the end is what we’ve seen all along, which is a fealty to private interests over public interests,” said David Hayes, former deputy secretary of the Interior Department under Obama and now adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law. “They seem intent on finalizing these as a kind of ideological point.”
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