None of the of 14 significant regulatory actions finalized during FY 2018 by the Trump administration are significantly improving the public’s health and safety or saving lives, according to Public Citizen, a citizens’ advocacy organization.
Public Citizen analyzed the U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions for fall 2018 released on Tuesday.
“Today’s deregulatory agenda shows that the Trump administration finalized zero significant health and safety protections in fiscal year 2018,” said Lisa Gilbert, vice president of legislative affairs for Public Citizen. “This is a clear indication that our regulatory agencies have been corrupted and captured by corporate interests.”
Under the Trump administration, regulators are focused only on boosting corporate profits, not saving lives or protecting the public by holding corporate wrongdoers accountable, Gilbert said.
“While it’s no surprise that the administration has aggressively rolled back regulations to please corporations, the fact that it refused to issue any regulations that save lives or protect the public shows just how extreme and radical the White House’s deregulatory agenda has become,” she said. “Instead, public protections that save lives are being systematically blocked or delayed in the name of ‘cutting red tape.’”
An example includes another delay of a rule limiting the amount of lead in drinking water. This is the third consecutive unified agenda where President Trump’s EPA has said that it will punt on issuing a new standard for lead in drinking water standard.
“This makes clear that under Trump, the EPA’s war on lead is dead,” said Gilbert.
The administration ignores the benefits of the rules it’s cutting, and then it wildly exaggerates the size of the purported savings to big business, she said.
The administration’s claimed cost savings of $23 billion are inflated and highly misleading. In the memo documenting these numbers is an admission that the $23 billion in savings to corporations isn’t an annual figure for FY 2018 but rather is an estimate for over a “perpetual time horizon.” The annual value is only $1.61 billion in savings this year.
Gilbert said the Trump’s administration deregulatory agenda shows that crucial health, safety, and environmental protections are being dismantled.
Is anyone surprised? I can only hope his “base” as well as the GOP in Congress suffer the physical damage from Terrump’s policies, rather then everyone else–although I suspect the opposite will be true.
Hi azure,
Yes, unfortunately, we will all suffer from President Trump’s deregulation policies. One study showed that there will be 80,000 extra deaths each decade from the environmental and and chemical deregulations Trump and his buddies are putting into place.
Rita