President Donald Trump will continue to target duplicative and ineffective regulations as part of his administration’s “spring agenda,” the White House announced Wednesday.
Trump’s reform agenda will cut across many areas and top priorities for deregulation include infrastructure development, emerging technologies, and “relief for small business,” a senior White House official said during a conference call coinciding with the announcement.
The senior official cited Trump’s previous executive order directing all government agencies “to repeal at least two existing regulations for each new regulation issued in [fiscal year] 2017 and thereafter.” In many ways, the official said, the administration’s spring agenda is an extension of that order.
Diane Katz, a senior research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, credited the Trump administration for working to alleviate the burdens of government regulation.
“Release of the spring agenda provides further evidence that the Trump administration remains committed to regulatory reform,” Katz said in an email Wednesday to The Daily Signal. “It is indeed a relief that the drawbacks of excessive regulation are now recognized after eight very long years of unconstrained expansion under President Obama, who increased annual regulatory costs by $20 billion.”
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said during recent congressional testimony that the EPA alone took nearly two dozen actions that saved Americans $1 billion of a total of $8 billion in savings from the administration’s deregulation measures.
Nick Loris, an economist at The Heritage Foundation who specializes in energy and environmental policy, said he is particularly keen on the Trump EPA’s efforts to curtail regulations associated with so-called New Source Review and its impact on power plants.
New Source Review is a rigorous permitting process for construction of new power plants that has the stated purpose of protecting air quality.
“I’d say that any attempt to roll back NSR is an important step in the right direction both for the economy and the environment,” Loris said in an email to The Daily Signal.
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