Trump's Regulatory Order Exceeds His Constitutional Authority, Alleges Complaint
President Donald Trump’s Jan. 30 executive order requiring federal agencies to kill two regulations for every new one they issue got its first judicial challenge Wednesday when the Natural Resources Defense Council and others sued the administration for a declaratory judgment that the order exceeds Trump’s constitutional authority.
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Trump’s order “will block or force the repeal of regulations needed to protect health, safety, and the environment,” said the complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by NRDC, Public Citizen and the Communications Workers of America. The directive that federal agencies “zero out costs to regulated industries, while entirely ignoring benefits to the Americans whom Congress enacted these statutes to protect, will force agencies to take regulatory actions that harm the people of this nation,” said the complaint.
Directing agencies to kill two regulations for every new one issued, “based solely on a directive to impose zero net costs and without any consideration of benefits, is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law,” said the complaint. “No governing statute” authorizes an agency to withhold a public-safety regulation “on the basis of an arbitrary upper limit on total costs,” it said.
The order seeks to impose rulemaking requirements “beyond and in conflict with” those of the Administrative Procedure Act “and the statutes from which the federal agencies derive their rulemaking authority,” the complaint said. It exceeds the president’s authority under the Constitution, “usurps” the legislative authority of Congress and violates the president’s constitutional oath to be sure U.S. laws are “faithfully executed,” it said.
Regulatory protections “do impose costs on regulated industry, but almost never as much as industry alleges,” the plaintiff groups said Wednesday in a Q&A sheet explaining their rationale. “Regulatory benefits vastly exceed costs, even using accounting systems that are heavily biased to favor corporations. The monetary benefits of major regulations issued since 2000, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, exceed costs by at least 2-1 and as much as 14-1, according to the most careful governmental analysis.” Trump’s order “irrationally excludes consideration of these benefits, permitting consideration of cost to business only,” the groups said.
The White House didn’t comment. CTA President Gary Shapiro declined comment, but referred us to testimony he gave last week before the Senate Commerce Committee where he hailed Trump’s order as a “forced triage system” for reducing unnecessary federal regulatory burdens (see 1702010036). Shapiro hopes the order, though a "blunt instrument," will “force a review that is necessary and long overdue of a lot of rules which just shouldn’t be on the books,” he told the committee.