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Letting Dirty Trucks Glide Past Pollution Protections

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The White House agency in charge of reviewing regulations, the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conspired with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to circumvent important rulemaking requirements – and ram through a deregulatory giveaway to “glider” trucks, which are super-polluting diesel freight trucks created by dropping old, dirty truck engines into new truck bodies. If allowed to go forward, this loophole for the trucking industry will pollute our air and harm children’s health.

The story begins several years ago when, under the Obama administration, the EPA applied its new, cleaner emissions standards to glider trucks. When the Trump administration took power, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt attempted to exempt glider trucks from the Obama era emission standards as a handout to the industry that makes them. The EPA’s Inspector General (IG) is already investigating the EPA’s role in this tawdry tale, but new reporting makes clear that the White House’s role in this incident needs to be investigated as well.

When Public Citizen examined the glider truck carve-out, we discovered potential manipulation of the EPA’s rulemaking process, as outlined in testimony to the EPA’s scientific advisory board in 2018, before the IG investigation was requested. From documents publicly available at the time, we found that the EPA intentionally avoided conducting certain analyses to conceal the harmful health impacts of allowing dirtier emissions from glider trucks, especially on children.

U.S. Senate Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee reached a similar conclusion in December 2018 and requested that the EPA’s IG investigate the agency’s process for repealing cleaner emissions standards for glider trucks.

Now, newly released documents show that EPA’s IG is almost certain to confirm our suspicions: that the agency knowingly refused to do numerous analyses on the harmful impacts of its carve-out for glider trucks that normally are required when taking this type of regulatory action.

Usually, an agency’s attempt to skirt analytical requirements runs into problems when the regulation is sent to OIRA, the small office in the White House that is tasked with reviewing and approving certain regulations and their accompanying analyses.

But the new documents show that OIRA acted as an accomplice, helping the EPA flout the analytical requirements. In fact, it looks like OIRA deliberately fast-tracked the glider trucks carve-out by allowing the EPA to bypass analyses that are required for exemptions from new emissions standards.

A few weeks ago, a Bloomberg Law reporter broke the story that former EPA head Pruitt received a handwritten letter from a former Republican congresswoman from Tennessee asking for the glider carve-out. One of the largest glider truck manufacturers is based in her district.

The story, based on EPA documents obtained by the reporter through a Freedom of Information Act request, confirmed strong suspicions that the EPA was lowering the emissions standards for glider trucks as a political favor to the congresswoman and the glider manufacturer.

Buried within the hundreds of pages of documents were emails from staff at both the EPA and OIRA showing both agencies colluding to rush through the glider truck carve-out by skipping the required analyses.

OIRA was created under President Ronald Reagan to review and approve the most important and impactful regulations from federal agencies. But since its founding, OIRA generally has opposed strong regulations that protect the public while favoring deregulation.

This incident is just the latest example.

The reason the EPA sent its glider trucks carve-out to OIRA in the first place is because the regulation was classified as an “economically significant” regulation. In other words, the EPA (correctly) believed that the regulation would have major economic impacts. Such rules have to be reviewed by OIRA.

When a rulemaking is classified as “economically significant,” in addition to putting it under OIRA review, it also normally triggers a requirement to assess its potential costs and benefits. And when it’s a rulemaking from the EPA, this designation also triggers the requirement to look at the public health impacts on children and minorities. All of these analyses ultimately would need to be reviewed by OIRA as it does its review of a rule.

Yet the EPA sent OIRA the glider truck rulemaking without any of the required analyses. In fact, the regulation had virtually no evidence to support it. Moreover, the EPA did nothing to refute its earlier findings from the Obama administration that exempting glider trucks from clean air standards would lead to enormous amounts of harmful pollution that would negatively impact vulnerable populations.

Normally, OIRA would have rejected the regulation and told the EPA to do the supporting analyses before allowing the EPA even to propose the rulemaking. Under the Obama administration, OIRA never hesitated to hold up regulations, often for years, while it insisted agencies provide more information and analyses to justify regulations.

As emails between the EPA and OIRA show, OIRA allowed the EPA to change the designation of the glider truck regulation from “economically significant” to merely “significant” to let the EPA propose the carve-out without having to do the various analyses required of “economically significant” rules.

This was the very last change the EPA made to the regulation before OIRA ended its review of the regulation and approved EPA to propose it publicly. OIRA wanted the change in order to cover its tracks, since leaving the regulation as “economically significant” would have led to questions as to why the typical analyses that accompany “economically significant” regulations had not been done by EPA.

One of the email subject lines from an EPA staffer reads, “RE: last minute significance change request from OMB.” While the content of the email is redacted, the subject line clearly indicates that OIRA (housed within OMB) requested that the EPA change the significance designation of the regulation.

Subsequent emails dispel any doubt that this occurred.

One email from an EPA staffer to other high-level EPA political appointees reads, “we just received word from OMB that they have cleared the Glider NPRM (with the change from “economically significant” to “significant”).” In other words, OMB cleared the change in the rulemaking’s designation from “economically significant” to “significant.”

Another internal EPA email makes clear that OMB requested the change, “…given that OMB was the one proposing the change be made from ‘economically significant’ to ‘significant…’”

Interestingly, this email chain also contained an email from an EPA career staffer with the subject line, “Why the draft glider repeal NPRM is Economically Significant.” This indicates that the EPA’s career staff believed the proper classification for the glider truck exemption would be an “economically significant” regulation.

These emails should lead the EPA’s IG to conclude that agency violated basic requirements in the regulatory process in trying to exempt glider trucks from pollution standards. With OIRA’s help, the EPA deliberately mischaracterized its carve-out for glider trucks to make it look like it was complying with requirements in the rulemaking process, when in fact it was not.

This raises profound concerns about the integrity of both the EPA’s rulemaking process, which already has come under close scrutiny due to numerous lapses under the Trump administration, as well as the integrity of OIRA’s regulatory review process.

A top to bottom audit of the EPA’s rulemaking process and OIRA’s regulatory review process might reveal that this incident is just the tip of the iceberg.

Calling on Chris Hayes to go All In on Climate

Tomorrow, MSNBC host Chris Hayes is hosting an hour-long primetime special about the urgent need to meet the climate crisis head on.

This is welcome, but not unprecedented.

Meet the Press devoted its final program of 2018 to climate. That episode came nearly five months after The New York Times Magazine’s Twitter handle teased out this message, “On August 1, our entire magazine will contain one single story: Thirty years ago we had a chance to save the planet. We could have fixed climate change. We failed to act.”

These moments of climate immersion by media influencers like Meet the Press and The New York Times – and now Chris Hayes – are significant, but the public also needs a steady diet of climate news and commentary to grapple with the magnitude of this crisis and learn about the solutions.

Chris Hayes has been stepping up his climate coverage. We are calling on him to take an even bigger step: cover the climate crisis every week.

All in on Climate?

On July 24, Chris Hayes, in response to a tweet calling out news networks’ failure to connect climate and extreme weather events, tweeted that climate change is a “palpable ratings killer” for news shows.

The comment ignited a flurry of retorts and challenges, including from climate journalist Eric Holthaus, who pointed out that a climate piece he wrote for Rolling Stone “was the most-shared in its history.”

In response, and to Hayes’ credit, his show, All in with Chris Hayes, has featured more segments on climate and mentions of climate since then.

He even dedicated an entire podcast episode to the “ratings killer” challenge:



In the past 24 months, climate change has been mentioned or featured on 80 episodes of All In. Thirty-eight, or nearly half, of those instances have occurred in the last eight months (since the end of July).   

In March 2019 alone, Hayes has mentioned or featured climate change in seven episodes, including in lengthy discussions about the climate crisis and solutions with author David Wallace-Wells, presidential candidate and Washington Governor Jay Inslee, and Senator Ed Markey.

Hayes is the only MSNBC host to have connected the recent, tragic flooding in the Midwest U.S. to the climate crisis:

[E]normous swaths of the Midwest are underwater after massive flooding…snapshots of our new normal in the era of climate change, which most models show will produce more and more extreme weather events.

Among his peers on MSNBC, he ranks first on mentioning climate change on his programing during that same 24-month period.  

It’s clear that Hayes is covering key climate moments and connecting extreme weather to our increasingly warming world. No doubt.  

But when looking just at segments on climate or significant discussion on climate, the numbers drop by almost half to just 45 segments in the past two years.

Looked at another way, although Hayes has rightly called climate change “the single most important issue we face, probably the most important issue in the history of civilization,” he has featured a segment on climate during just 32 of the past 106 weeks. Seventy-four of the past 106 weeks have gone by without Hayes focusing any segment on climate.

An issue of this magnitude – on which civilization hinges – merits more consistent coverage.  

The BBC thinks so.

In late September, BBC editor Jo Floto announced that the network’s flagship programs, The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and Newshour on BBC World Service, would begin covering climate change every week.

MSNBC and Chris Hayes are well positioned to be the first network and anchor in the US to make that pledge: Cover climate change every week.

Chris Hayes cares about this issue. He gets it. He is covering it better than most and, on top of that, he’s also been improving recently. We want him to go further. We want him to go all in on climate.

Tune in tomorrow for the “All In with Chris Hayes” climate special at 8 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

 

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Caught in the Crosshairs of Corporate Power. Part 3: Fracking Pollution

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This is part three of a five part series.

When political candidates spend their time begging for cash from wealthy interests and legislating to prioritize private profits over the public good, regular people lose out. The corporations and superrich donors that dominate our elections have an outsized influence over who wins, what gets discussed in campaigns and what legislative ideas receive serious consideration.

The sweeping legislative package known as the For the People Act (H.R. 1) contains ethics, campaign finance and voting rights reforms that are essential to make our government work effectively and fairly.

To illustrate the need for reforms that reduce corporate influence and redistribute power to the people, Public Citizen compiled stories of five regular Americans whose lives have been impacted by corporate political power.

Corporate Power Spotlight: Fracking Pollution

“How do you as a landowner stand a chance when the industry wrote the law?”

– Ronald Gulla, 63, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania

With more than six years of experience working for oil and gas businesses, Ron Gulla thought he understood the industry. In 2002, he signed a lease to allow drilling on his farm. That lease would later be acquired by Range Resources, a major fracking corporation based in Texas. When drilling began in 2005, Gulla found himself mired in a toxic mess.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves in drilling deep into the earth and injecting the wells with millions of gallons of water, sand and other chemicals to break apart underground shale rock and release the gas.

“Range Resources says ‘Drilling is just the beginning’,” said Gulla. “Well, the spilling is also the beginning.”

Pennsylvania. Attorney General Josh Shapiro is overseeing a grand jury investigation into alleged environmental crimes in Washington County, Pa. — an investigation which reportedly includes alleged wrongdoing by Range Resources.

Over three years, four gas wells were drilled on Gulla’s farm in Washington County, Pa, about 30 miles west of Pittsburgh. The nearest drilling rig was 600 feet away. The road the drillers built used mill slag – a byproduct of steel manufacturing often seen piled up in black heaps near steel mills – in order to access one of the rig was just 150 feet away.

When it rained, Gulla recalls water running off of the drillers’ road, through the slag and into his family’s water well. “That mill slag is toxic,” said Gulla. “There’s arsenic in it, there’s pieces of railroad tie in it, which has creosote [a toxic substance]. It has metal in it and plastic and all kinds of garbage. If you go and buy slag, it tells you right there on the back of it, don’t breathe the dust. It’s bad stuff.”

Gulla’s family immediately stopped drinking the discolored well water. “Two years or so down the road, I noticed while brushing my teeth that the water got a really strong metallic taste to it.”

Gulla also saw fracking wastewater from well pads – the small industrial sites where the drilling workers operated the rigs – flowing directly onto soil and into a stream. He saw the vegetation in the fish pond downhill from the well pads turn yellow and die. Then fish died. So did deer and neighboring cattle.

Black water bubbled and flowed from outside the well casing at the drill site near Gulla’s pond, he said. A water test in 2009 showed high levels of volatile organic compounds known as BTEXes – benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene. “All that was going into the pond,” said Gulla. “That’s what was killing everything. They’re all carcinogens. They’re deadly. You don’t want to be exposed to this stuff. And they were exposing us.”

In 2005, President George W. Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act, which contained provisions, infamously dubbed the “Halliburton loophole,” exempting the fracking industry from essential antipollution regulation.

But environmental groups have been unable to convince lawmakers to eliminate the loophole. Their many years of efforts have so far been blocked due to the industry’s stranglehold on Congress. Gulla sees the outsized role of big money in American politics as a key reason: “Everything comes back to Citizens United,” Gulla said, referring to the 2010 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing corporations to spend as much as they want to influence elections.

“There is no way on God’s green earth I would have signed the lease if I had known they were going to be exempt from the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. And the Safe Drinking Water Act. And the Right to Know, and the Superfund Act,” said Gulla. “When I worked in this industry, they were not exempt.”

He added: “How do you as a landowner stand a chance when the industry wrote the law?”

CORPORATE INFLUENCE AT WORK

The oil and gas industry uses its political influence to secure policies to block environmental and public protections and suppress development of the renewable energy sources that are essential for averting catastrophic climate change.

KEY FACTS:

The oil and gas industry has:

  • Spent more than $1.5 billion on lobbying in Washington since 2008.
  • Contributed more than $297 million in campaign money to Congress over the past 30 years.
  • Contributed 79 percent to Congressional Republicans and 21 percent to Congressional Democrats.

SOURCE: Center for Responsive Politics.

Under former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose election and re-election campaigns received millions from the oil and gas industry, lawmakers enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which had its origins in Cheney’s infamous energy task force that met in secret with energy company lobbyists. This bill secured billions in subsidies and regulatory rollbacks – including exemptions for fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Legislation to close the loopholes, which have been introduced and collectively dubbed the “Frack Pack” have not advanced. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry continues to gush donations on lawmakers that block progress on renewables. A recent Huffington Post analysis finds that senators who have not co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation, which would move to end U.S. reliance on polluting fossil fuels for energy, receive an average of seven times more in contributions from the oil and gas industry.

LOBBYING AND CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS:

Top Senate recipients of oil and gas contributions include U.S. senators from Texas, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (more than $3 million each over the course of their careers). Former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) each received more than $2 million from the industry. In the House, former Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who served as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee and infamously apologized to BP for how the government treated the oil giant after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, received more than $2 million from the industry, more than any other House member.

cover climate social_end of year BLOG

10 Remarkable Climate and Media Moments from 2018

Last week, Public Citizen released its annual review of how well the media did connecting extreme weather to climate coverage.  We found that the media still are underreporting the impacts of our rapidly warming world and at the very least, coverage is not on scale with the magnitude of the crisis.

But even as media as a whole underperformed on climate reporting this past year, there was a number of remarkable moments that played out in 2018 that provide hope and models for climate coverage in the year ahead.

1. South Florida Media Join Forces to Fight Back the Invading Sea

In May 2018, the editorial boards of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald, Palm Beach Post and WLRN Public Media announced an unprecedented collaboration “to raise awareness about the threat facing South Florida from sea-level rise.”  Their commitment to their readership was to, “in drumbeat fashion, inform, engage, provoke and build momentum” to address climate impacts in Florida.  

The Invading Sea project is the first of its kind and a model for other local media on educating and activating local communities on climate change.

2. Blowback to “Climate is a Ratings-Killer”  Claim

On July 24, MSNBC host Chris Hayes, in response to a tweet calling out news networks failure to connect climate and extreme weather events, tweeted that climate change is a “palpable ratings killer” for news shows. The comment ignited a flurry of retorts and challenges to the claim, including from climate journalist Eric Holthaus, who pointed out that a climate piece he wrote for Rolling Stone “was the most-shared in its history.”

But more interesting than the question of “is it” or “isn’t it” was the fact that Hayes’ tweet pushed a necessary discussion around the media’s coverage of climate into the Twittersphere – where many reporters and communicators roam. The prevailing takeaway and challenge to networks (and reporters) that shy away from climate appeared to be this: Climate is the story of our time. If you think the public doesn’t want to hear it, you’re just not telling it right.

3. New York Times Magazine Dedicates Entire Issue to Climate Change

On July 30, The New York Times Magazine’s Twitter handle teased out this message, “On August 1, our entire magazine will contain one single story: Thirty years ago we had a chance to save the planet. We could have fixed climate change. We failed to act.”

The next day, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” went live and the internet went into a frenzy.  Thousands of comments and responses immediately began circulating across social media platforms. Within the first two days of the story’s release, 800 people left their thoughts directly in The New York Times Magazine comment section.

Regardless of whether the response was critique or praise (and there was plenty of both), the bottom line is that one of the most influential national news outlets, for one day, made a huge commitment to one story: climate change.  By doing so, it asked its readers to do the same.

We are not calling on every news outlet to tell only one story. We just are asking them to cover climate consistently and with the frequency and depth the crisis demands.  

4. BBC: Pledges to Cover Climate Every Week

In late September, BBC editor Jo Floto announced that the network’s flagship programs, The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and Newshour on BBC World Service, would begin covering climate change every week.

More than just making a case for why it’s important to consistently cover climate, Floto gave insight into why well-meaning news outlets often give climate short shrift:

If this is true, then the prescription for underreporting the most significant issue of our time is for outlets to do exact what the BBC is doing: be deliberate, generating at least one dose of climate news every week.

5. Climate First in Florida Gubernatorial Debate

CNN’s Jake Tapper opened the October 21 debate between gubernatorial candidates Andrew Gillum and U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis with this question: “Given the threats Florida faces from intense hurricanes and rising sea levels, don’t Florida voters deserve to know where you stand on climate change?”

As Media Matters has documented, climate change is notoriously left out of political debates. But more and more, the impacts of climate, especially in states like Florida, not only cannot be ignored, but  also are permeating other issues that typically take center stage in debates: health care, the economy and security.

Going forward, every candidate — in fact, every elected official — should be asked publicly not just where they stand on climate change, but what they are going to do to protect their community, state or country from climate chaos.     

6. Climate Finally Gets the Media Attention it Deserves — Even if for the Wrong Reasons

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration attempted to quietly release a staggering report on the state of our climate, the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which in essence confirmed that climate change is here, it’s expensive and it’s deadly.

The attempt to bury the report by releasing it when most people were either still in a tryptophan coma or busting down store doors backfired. Trump’s stunt was so transparent that the media lingered much longer over the report than they would have otherwise.  

And though much ink and air time was dedicated to the timing (politics) of the report, the gravity of the report’s findings (science) still managed to occupy a place in the national spotlight well into the following week.

When Trump talks about climate, climate makes headlines.  Unfortunately, what Trump has to say about climate is always wrong.  The impacts of climate stand alone as a story – and climate scientists and experts should be the ones driving the story.

7. Meet the Press Pledges: No More Climate Deniers

Other stories generated by the release of the NCA went further.  

A handful critiqued the media coverage of the climate report, which was the product of hundreds of scientists within a consortium of 13 federal agencies including the Department of Defense, the EPA and NASA.

In short, coverage was a mixed bag. On one hand, the NCA garnered extensive coverage from print and broadcast media. On the other hand, some of the coverage featured well known and thoroughly debunked climate misinformation. Perhaps one of the worst offenders was NBC’s Meet the Press, which featured Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank supported by the Koch brothers.

The segment ran on November 25 and included Danielle Pletka falsely claiming that the world is actually cooling. The extensive criticism to Pletka’s appearance included a retort from ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five weeks later, Chuck Todd opened the Sunday morning program by saying, 

In and of itself, it was notable that an influential Sunday morning show dedicated its entire hour to climate and was intentional about not including those who sow climate misinformation.

But perhaps even more significant is that this segment appears to have been a response to the criticism the show received for giving a platform to climate denial during its coverage of the NCA. The broadcast news model that prioritizes conflict and false balance over truth needs reconsideration. Chuck Todd articulated the new model perfectly: thorough coverage of climate communicated by experts, never deniers.

8,9 & 10. Media Critics and Even the Media Itself: Calling for More Climate Coverage

In October, the editor of The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wrote a column for The Washington Post titled, “Why isn’t the media covering climate change all day, every day?”

If you look for it, it seems a form of this question is being presented to and by the media with some frequency.

Here are three of my favorite examples from 2018:

In an article appearing in Current Affairs at the end of August, its editor, Nathan J. Robinson, uses the example of The New York Times’ front page to call out media’s “strange and indefensible” priorities. The page in question devotes more than half of the page to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea. Below the Cohen article — and with a significantly  lower word count — appears a story about how the Trump administration’s rollback of pollution regulations could kill 1,400 people per year.

About this specific example he concludes, “Did the president engage in a sleazy and probably illicit payoff scheme to silence women he had slept with? Probably. But the president is also allowing polluters to kill children, and I know which story I think belongs at the top of the page.”

More broadly — and in the category of “hitting the nail on the top of the head,” Robinson laments, “Climate change, for instance, poses an existential threat to the human species and could lead to catastrophic suffering on a global scale. Significant action has to be taken immediately if we want to preserve a habitable planet. That seems like it should be at the top of the newspaper every single day!”  Uh, yeah!

This story by media columnist, Margaret Sullivan appeared in The Washington Post in October: “The planet is on a fast path to destruction. The media must cover this like it’s the only story that matters.”

Sullivan hits all the right points: The public isn’t hearing enough about  climate change; we need sustained coverage to stand a chance of maintaining a livable planet; the media is spending too much time chasing Trump; and the public is news-weary.

Her conclusion is spot on: “Just as the smartest minds in earth science have issued their warning, the best minds in media should be giving sustained attention to how to tell this most important story in a way that will creates change.”

But perhaps my favorite thing about this column on climate is that it appeared in the Style section. This is the last point: Climate news needs to appear beyond the science section.

In a segment appearing on MSNBC in November, anchor Katy Tur brought on climate scientist Michael Mann to speak to the increasingly costly wildfires and the increasingly shocking denial and inaction by the Trump administration. During the segment she also tied in an article in The New Yorker by Bill McKibben that assess the ways climate change is making less of the Earth’s surface habitable by humans. It is here that she appears to have her climate and media “Ah moment.” She says to Mann:

I thought, “Gosh, how pointless is my life? And how important are the decisions that I’m making on a day-to-day basis when people are not focused on climate change every day when it’s not leading every one of our newscasts?”

My first reaction was, “thannnnk you.”  My second thought was, is this the first such article (of which there are thousands) that she has fully read and digested? Her response to McKibben’s article is very appropriate, but it does seem like she just discovered that climate change is an existential threat to our planet. For the first time. In November 2018.  

It reminds me of an article by the brilliant Emily Adkin, who, blasted not only the networks for giving deniers airtime during the National Climate Assessment coverage, but the hosts who were wholly unprepared to push back on long debunked climate misinformation.

She hammers home the point that broadcast journalists MUST get up to speed on climate.

They can and they must.  If they do, in addition to not letting lies go by unchallenged, we are likely to see more journalists “A-ha moments”  — and more fierce and personal climate coverage.

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Sifting Through the Wreckage: Deregulatory Actions in Trump’s 2018 2-for-1 Report

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In mid-October, the Trump administration released its annual report detailing deregulatory actions taken under the ill-conceived 2-for-1 executive order, which requires agencies to eliminate two regulations for any single new regulatory action.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, a noted deregulation devotee with an open ear for contribution-giving bank lobbyists, described the report’s release as delivering on President Trump’s promise to “[get] rid of Washington’s unnecessary, outdated, and duplicative regulatory burdens.” Neomi Rao, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and Trump’s deregulation point person, lauded the purported $23 billion dollars in regulatory costs to corporations saved in 2018. Mulvaney and Rao conveniently did not mention that the $23 billion cost savings represent projections over a “perpetual time horizon” rather than an annual estimate, making that number look much bigger than it is in reality. With all the time they spent patting themselves on the back for giving corporations even more handouts, neither official mentioned the extremely significant regulatory benefits that have been axed as part of the deregulatory frenzy of the past year.

Administration officials and anti-regulatory zealots justify wholesale deregulation by arguing that it serves to cut useless, outdated or burdensome regulations. The reality is starkly different; regulations serve to protect the public and set the legal framework to ensure basic liberties. Americans are harmed when safeguards are gutted. Here are just a few of the proposed or existing public safeguards included in Trump’s self-congratulatory deregulation report that have now been terminated:

  • Fracking regulations. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an industrial process used to extract natural gas from deep in the earth that involves pumping millions of gallons of chemicals into the ground. Not surprisingly, scientific evidence suggests that the practice has serious negative environmental and public health consequences. In 2015, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued regulations requiring companies fracking on public lands to comply with a series of planning and review requirements – including disclosure of the types of chemicals that were being pumped into the ground. The rule was repealed by the Trump administration because it supposedly “imposes burdensome reporting requirements and other unjustified costs on the oil and gas industry.” The withdrawal notice paid little heed to action’s effect on the land, water or people around fracking sites.
  • Airline baggage fee transparency. It’s hard to plan affordable travel when your flight’s checked bag fees aren’t revealed until your final click. To address the problem, the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) undertook regulation to require airlines to disclosure ancillary fees, including charges for checked bags, at all points of sale. The proposal would have required airlines to disclose exactly how much checked bags would cost before customers selected a fare. The Trump administration withdrew the proposal on the grounds that “existing regulations already provide consumers some information regarding fees for ancillary services.” Unfortunately for the flying public, the hidden fee status quo remains.
  • Online accessibility for people with disabilities. The internet is not one size fits all, especially for hearing or vision impaired Americans. Although the internet has become an integral aspect of everyday life, there is still no defined legal framework in place that governs website accessibility for people with disabilities. In 2010, the Justice Department proposed regulations defining the scope of the Americans with Disabilities Act as applied to the internet. The action was “withdrawn for further review” in October 2017.
  • Workplace injury recordkeeping. Federal law requires employers to keep a record of employee injuries. These records can be used to protect workers by discerning injury trends and ultimately prevent accidents. In 2016, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) established a rule that required large employers (over 250 employees) to electronically submit their injury records to OSHA each year. Trump’s OSHA justified a repeal of the requirement by claiming the reporting would jeopardize worker privacy and burden employers. Ensuring that workers return home to their loved ones was apparently not a pressing priority.
  • Protections against unsafe imported food. Foreign food imported into the United States must meet safety standards; otherwise it must be exported or destroyed. Sometimes, shady food importers engage in a practice known as port shopping, which is moving rejected food from one port to another in hopes of avoiding inspection. In the late 1990’s, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and a U.S. Senate subcommittee identified the problem and then-President Clinton ordered the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to take action. The FDA’s proposal was simple; the shipping container and accompanying documents for unsafe food imports should be labelled “UNITED STATES: REFUSED ENTRY.” Despite the common-sense nature of the regulation, Trump’s FDA withdrew the proposal without explanation.

The loss of these important regulations is just the tip of the iceberg. The lost protections span across a huge spectrum of American life and will have long-lasting impacts on the public. Disturbingly, the pace is likely to quicken. In the words of Administrator Rao, “we’re projecting even more reform in 2019.” That might please corporations looking to increase their bottom lines, but should worry Americans and their families who will be left paying the price.

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