'Trump's deregulatory disregard for law and science'
The fine people at Science have chosen to put the article behind their paywall.Despite political tumult and pandemic struggles, and perhaps due to the election season’s arrival, the Trump administration has been especially busy with regulatory rollbacks. These rollbacks highlight key components of the administration’s deregulatory playbook and the costs of its disregard for law and science.
While presidents have some latitude to choose their priorities, they cannot rewrite the law by fiat, or with mere orders to executive branch agencies. Under the Constitution, presidents must ensure agencies “faithfully execute” the nation’s many laws, including those protecting health and the environment. Furthermore, longstanding law requires honest and thorough agency grappling with the best available science, critical public comments and analysis of impacts of regulatory choices. So how has the administration done?
In a recent peer-reviewed article in Science, we analyzed the claimed rationales, legal infirmities and wide-ranging environmental harms of the Trump administration’s recently implemented Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR). The rule addresses the critically important issue of what “waters” are federally protected under the Clean Water Act. In developing it, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under Trump, disregarded both law and science.
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The Trump administration ... turned a blind eye to the science on how water connects landscapes, from ridges-to-reefs, thereby both performing ecosystem functions and providing ecosystem services, including water quality improvement, flood control and fish and wildlife support. The administration relied heavily on a minority Supreme Court opinion that itself ignored statutory goals and scientific evidence, focusing instead on permanent flows and connections between waterbodies, while downplaying protective criteria endorsed by court majorities.
The result? The new rule eliminates protections for millions of miles of streams and acres of wetlands across the United States. The rule exacerbates harms from increasingly frequent droughts, contaminants, algal blooms and other stressors that are often exacerbated by climate change. EPA’s own data suggest any rollback is a terrible idea, showing poor conditions in nearly half of our rivers and streams and one-third of the nation’s remaining wetlands. And EPA's own Science Advisory Board criticized the rule’s inconsistency with science.
