De-Trumpification: Restoring Environmental Protections

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The recent East Palestine, Ohio, rail explosion was another reminder of the danger of the Trump administration’s rollback of hundreds of environmental protections created during the Obama Administration. We appreciate the commitment you made on your first day in office to prioritize environmental protection, and are tracking your progress and sharing it with our friends and family.

Background

We have issued a series of Calls to Action so far, asking President Biden to de-Trumpify our government by replacing Trump holdovers embedded in government agencies. This time, we want to support the Biden administration in continuing some more complex de-Trumpification: reversing the Trump-era rollback of environmental protections that had been instituted during the Obama-Biden administration. President Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to prioritize action on the climate emergency and protection of our environment.

President Biden’s first executive order encompassed the entire executive branch : “Directing all executive departments and agencies to immediately review and take appropriate action to address federal regulations and other executive actions taken during the last four years that were harmful to public health, damaging to the environment, unsupported by the best available science, or otherwise not in the national interest.”

The Trump administration’s 211 rollbacks of Obama-Biden environmental protections can be divided into categories like climate, environment, health, and programs and processes. The rollbacks occurred through many types of actions, including executive orders, guidance documents, agency regulations, interpretations, and other policy-making maneuvers.

Some of Trump’s rollbacks were easier to undo, without judicial or legislative review, and could be reversed simply by executive order. Other wins involved new agency leadership that reversed the guidance of the previous administration. President Biden made rapid progress in these areas within his first several months in office.

Other environmental de-Trumpification requires that agencies follow formal processes to build up an evidentiary record before starting the legal process necessary to reverse some of Trump’s more complicated environmental protection rollbacks. In some cases, such as Trump’s gutting and replacement of the Obama-Biden administration’s Clean Power Plan or vehicle standards, reversal may take multiple years. And the Biden-Harris administration has been making progress on those items too, as these examples show:

February 17, 2023: EPA is reaffirming the scientific, economic, and legal underpinnings of the 2012 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants, which required significant reductions of mercury, acid gasses, and other harmful pollutants.
February 21, 2023: Freight rail industry should accelerate phase-in of safer tank cars and provide workers with paid sick leave, and Congress can raise existing caps on the fines for rail safety regulations. USDOT will advance train crew staffing rule, initiate a focused safety inspection program on routes over which high-hazard flammable trains (HHFTs) travel. Secretary Buttigieg noted that" we at USDOT are doing everything in our power to improve rail safety, and we insist that the rail industry do the same—while inviting Congress to work with us to raise the bar."

The Biden-Harris administration has been making steady progress on their commitment to the complex, crucial task of environmental de-Trumpification, with over seventy reversals of Trump’s environmental rollbacks made by the end of last year. We have included in our References articles that track their progress in detail.