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View from Washington: Trump targets regulation

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Politicians make a lot of promises when running for office, many of which they have little or no intention of actually fulfilling. But President Donald Trump, the ultimate nonpolitician, is doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail when it comes to deregulation.

The former-businessman-turned-president vowed to undo as many regulations as possible to alleviate the burden on American businesses when running for office, and he has taken swift action to do just that. He issued an executive order on Jan. 30 stating that an agency may issue a new regulation only if it rescinds at least two existing regulations to offset the costs — drawing the ire of a coalition of environmental, consumer advocacy and labor groups, which deemed the order unconstitutional and sued the president to stop it.

The president and the Republican Congress are also moving fast to use an underutilized tool at their disposal: the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to reject major agency rules adopted in the prior 60 legislative days. He and Congress sent a Valentine’s Day gift to the energy industry by toppling a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulation on resource extraction disclosure, which would have required oil and gas companies to disclose in annual reports payments of $100,000 or more made annually to U.S. or foreign governments related to energy development.

Two days later, the energy sector got more love from the president when he signed a resolution of disapproval against the Department of the Interior’s Stream Protection Rule, which overturns a December 2016 rule to regulate water pollution caused by coal mining. Other disapproval resolutions to undo midnight regulations adopted by the Obama administration are moving through the legislative pipeline as well.

Without cooperation between the president and Congress, the use of the CRA is typically a major challenge because disapproval resolutions require either a president’s signature or a two-thirds majority vote in each house to overcome a veto. Due to these limitations, the CRA had only been successfully used once to undo a federal agency regulation prior to this year. In 2001, President George W. Bush and Congress used the 1996 law to derail the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s efforts to regulate ergonomics via a formal standard.

OSHA rules passed during the final months of the Obama administration may suffer the same fate. A Republican legislator has just introduced a resolution of disapproval under the CRA that targets OSHA’s rule that clarifies that employers have a continuing obligation to make and maintain an accurate record of each recordable injury and illness for five years — the controversial Volks rule.

The agency was criticized for its aggressive enforcement stance under the Obama administration, with employers and their representatives hoping for more collaboration on workplace safety programs with the Trump administration. Overturning some of the Obama’s administration’s handiwork, which employers argued had no impact on safety and could have the consequence of forcing them to spend more time on paperwork and less on actions to make worksites safer, could signal the start of a hearts-and-flowers relationship between the administration and employers.