If There’s A Rule, There’s A Reason

All the way back in the year 2000, Julia Roberts portrayed real-life legal assistant Erin Brockovich in the story of how one woman fought against the mighty PB&E utility company to prove that they were poisoning the people of Hinkley, California. The movie was extremely popular and gave rise to any number of whistleblowers looking to profit off uncovering the dirty details behind secret corporate errors.

Twenty-five years later, guess what: Hinkley, California, remains contaminated with hexavalent chromium (Cr-6) decades after the Erin Brockovich lawsuit. While PG&E’s cleanup efforts have removed 89% of the contaminant, levels in some wells still exceed state safety standards. The contamination has impacted the town’s water quality and the health of residents, leading to concerns about long-term effects. The town’s population has declined considerably, and those remaining continue to grapple with the effects of the contamination.

There are a shit ton of government regulations on the books, both federal and state, that should have stopped PG&E from completely poisoning the entire town. But PG&E has money. And unfortunately, money has always had an impact on how laws are enforced, even when the outcome is devastating for people and wildlife.

On Feb. 19, President Punk signed an executive order requiring agencies, within 60 days and in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget and Elroy Muskrat-backed Department of Government Efficiency, to identify for elimination or modification regulations that are unconstitutional or unlawful. 

With roughly a week-and-a-half before that deadline, the president on Wednesday declared that such regulations can be repealed without going through the notice and comment period. When an agency promulgates a new rule, or revokes one, it must seek, respond to and potentially incorporate public comment on the proposal. The process usually takes at least a year. 

The Punk administration, however, is arguing that it does not have to take this step because of the “good cause” exception in the Administrative Procedure Act, which is the law that sets rulemaking requirements. The exception provides that agencies do not have to perform notice and comment if doing so would be “impracticable, unnecessary or contrary to the public interest.”

“There may well be many regulations they can revise or revoke in light of these recent Supreme Court decisions, but there are going to be very few they can simply revoke with a brief statement, as the president’s order suggested,” said Susan E. Dudley, who served as the top regulatory official in the George W. Bush administration.

Is this bad? Yeah, this gets really bad. Everything hinges on a 1985 Supreme Court decision, Heckler vs. Chaney, in which Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that if a federal agency did not enforce a regulatory action, that act was generally beyond the review of the courts.

That precedent could give the Punk & Co. administration grounds to stop enforcing the rules.

“That puts them in a very strong posture,” said Lisa Heinzerling, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University who served in the E.P.A. during the Obama administration. “People have taken advantage of Heckler vs. Cheney before but not in this across-the-board fashion.”

The whole thing about government regulations is that they exist for a purpose. Sometimes, “regulation” sounds like a complicated or annoying word, maybe just red tape. But really, regulations are mostly just rules put in place to try and keep people safe, ensure things are fair, and protect the environment we all share.

Think about traffic laws – stop signs, speed limits, rules about not texting while driving. They restrict what we can do, sure, but we generally accept them because they prevent chaos and accidents, making the roads safer for everyone. Environmental and business regulations often work on a similar principle. Rules about clean air, like those monitored here, mean factories have limits on what they can pump into the sky, which helps reduce things like asthma and keeps our air healthier to breathe. Clean water regulations aim to keep industrial waste out of rivers like the White River, ensuring safer water for drinking, fishing, and swimming. Food safety rules mean we can generally trust that what we buy at the grocery store won’t make us sick. Workplace safety regulations try to make sure employers provide basic protections so people don’t get unnecessarily injured on the job, whether that’s on a construction site or in an office. These rules set a baseline standard for health and safety that benefits everybody.

Regulations can also protect us financially. Rules for banks help prevent risky behaviors that could lead to a crash, protecting people’s savings. Rules against false advertising try to make sure companies aren’t tricking us. They can also help ensure fairness in the marketplace, preventing giant monopolies from crushing all competition or ensuring basic workers’ rights are respected. Essentially, they act as guardrails, setting minimum expectations for behavior to protect the public’s health, safety, finances, and the environment.

Now, given that these rules provide these kinds of protections, you can see why sudden and rapid deregulation – getting rid of these rules quickly without careful planning – can cause a lot of problems. Imagine if overnight all the traffic lights and speed limits just disappeared. Would it create instant freedom? Probably not. More likely, it would cause widespread confusion, gridlock, and a big spike in accidents because the system everyone understood for keeping order is suddenly gone.

Sudden deregulation can work similarly. If rules limiting pollution are abruptly removed, companies might save money in the short term, but communities could quickly face dirtier air and water, leading to more health problems and costly cleanup down the road. If workplace safety rules are slashed, we might see a rise in injuries. Rapidly removing financial regulations could encourage the kind of risky behavior that led to past financial crises, potentially destabilizing the economy. Environmental protections could vanish, leading to quicker depletion of resources or damage to natural areas we value for recreation and ecological balance.

The key here is often the “sudden and rapid” part. Removing rules without time for businesses, communities, and oversight systems to adapt, or without putting alternative safeguards in place, creates a vacuum. It pulls out the existing guardrails, and while the intention might be presented as promoting freedom or economic growth, the immediate result can often be instability, increased risks to public well-being, and damage that’s hard and expensive to undo. It often benefits specific interests in the short term but can create widespread problems for everyone else long term.

What all is at risk? Here are just a few of the items uncovered by the New York Times.

At the Labor Department, Trump officials are eying the repeal of rules that increased the number of workers who are eligible for sick leave, minimum wage and overtime pay.

At the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, regulators are targeting rules that expanded background checks for buyers and sellers of guns.

Federal Trade Commission officials are viewing a rule that forbids hotels and ticket vendors to advertise prices that fail to disclose certain fees.

And at the Agriculture Department, Secretary Brooke Rollins wants to streamline the procedures governing production speed in pork and poultry plants, allowing more meat to be processed each day. The changes would also replace some government food and safety inspectors in the plants with corporate inspectors.

Those are just the start of a cycle of deregulation that Punk hopes eliminates at least half of all regulatory laws that are on the books. Fortunately, there is already some pushback.

Public Citizen, a public interest nonprofit, seized on the eliminated notice-and-comment requirements in a statement denouncing Trump’s directive.

“President Trump is not a king. He cannot simply roll back regulations that protect the public without going through the legally required process,” said co-president Lisa Gilbert. “We will challenge this blatantly unlawful deregulatory effort at every step to ensure it doesn’t hurt workers, consumers and families.”

Democracy Forward, which has launched several lawsuits against the Trump administration, said it also would sue over Wednesday’s memorandum. 

“The policies and programs that the nation has put in place, and that have served communities for decades, cannot be undone with the arbitrary stroke of a pen, despite what this president may wish,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of the national legal organization, in a statement.

At the same time, though, and not the least bit surprising, there are people who think the President has had a good idea. On the other hand, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank committed to “reform[ing] America’s unaccountable regulatory state,” praised Trump’s deregulatory action. 

“This new initiative goes beyond previous orders invoking typical platitudes about efficiency, cost-benefit and ‘outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective’ by specifically invoking ‘deconstruction’ of an administrative state now largely regarded as unconstitutional and irredeemable,” said CEI regulatory studies fellow Wayne Crews in a statement. 

Don’t be fooled. ‘Outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective’ is corporate-speak for, ‘these rules are in our way, and we want them gone.’

It is difficult to stop the deregulation push, but it’s not impossible. This is a good time to support organizations that already have people in place to file lawsuits and, at the very least, prevent the deregulatory attempts from taking immediate effect. You also might want to add this to the list of things you contact your representatives about, though it’s likely to be more useful when/if you can mention a specific regulation that’s under fire.

Before Erin Brockovich stood up and made some noise, the people of Hinkley, CA, were dying at an alarming rate; even children were being diagnosed with advanced forms of cancer. If we do not fight against this massive deregulation effort, our air will not be safe, our water will not be safe, our food will not be safe, and our homes and buildings will not be safe. Large corporations don’t have our best interests in mind. If this is stopped, it will be because people like you took a stand.