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The document, known as Executive Order 13924, instructs federal agencies to look at regulatory actions they could take to encourage growth in the economy. The order instructs “federal agencies to use any and all authority to waive, suspend, and eliminate unnecessary regulations that impede economic recovery.” Among the complaints against regulators raised by PLF are that agencies fail to provide notice of the scope or content of investigations, use biased and unreliable evidence, and withhold exculpatory evidence, as they presume the other side’s guilt instead of bearing the burden of proof. Other complaints are that agencies threaten excessive penalties to...

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Thursday afternoon scaling back an Obama-era regulation farmers and energy producers claimed saddled them with unnecessary burdens. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the rule change in Las Vegas, effectively hemming in a regulation restricting the use of fertilizers and pesticides. President Donald Trump promised to repeal his predecessor’s “Waters of the United States” policy when he was running in 2016. Rolling back WOTUS saves landowners, farmers and businesses from being forced to hire “teams of attorneys to tell them how to use their own land,” Wheeler told reporters at a meeting of the...

President Donald Trump nixed nearly 100 environmental regulations during his first three years in office, effectively rolling back much of his Democratic predecessor’s environmental legacy.The president rolled back more than 90 environmental rules and regulations, The New York Times reported in December. The NYT relied on an analysis from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources to keep tabs on Trump’s numbers during his time in office.The NYT’s list includes regulations that are officially reversed and rollbacks still in progress.Trump has fully eliminated 25 rules designed to rein in air pollution and emissions, as well as 19 that regulate energy producers’ ability to drill and...

Candidate Donald Trump famously promised to get rid of two federal regulations for every new one. With 2 1/2 years in office under his belt, he has vastly exceeded that standard. Paul Bedard reports: It was an odd, geeky campaign promise for a populist presidential candidate to make. But when Donald Trump in 2016 pledged to kill two Obama-era regulations for every new one, crowds went wild. Those cheers stuck with him when he moved into the White House, and he put his promise into an executive order. And now as he opens his reelection campaign, Russ Vought, acting budget...

Trump’s Cabinet is putting his America First policies into place, including at the Department of Interior, where Secretary David Bernhardt announced a plan to open up more than 1.4 million acres of federal land through the elimination of some 7,500 regulations. The land, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, includes 74 national wildlife refuges and 15 national fish hatcheries. Bernhardt said: President Trump is committed to expanding public access on public lands, and this proposal is executing on that directive by opening and increasing more access to hunting and fishing by the Fish and Wildlife Service...

Federal agencies, led by Labor and Health and Human Services, are cutting Obama-era regulations and saving money faster than demanded by President Trump, according to a new report. And as a result, the administration is expected to easily meet the president’s order to cut at least two old regulations for every new one issued and cut the costs of regulations. “With less than two months remaining in FY 2018, the Trump administration is well on its way to surpassing its regulatory budget goals,” said the new report from American Action Forum, which charts federal regulations. “Collectively, executive agencies subject to...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Thursday that the Department of Justice was ending the “executive branch legal activism” of the previous administration, while also fighting the judicial activism of liberal judges. “I think the department did become too political” under President Barack Obama, Sessions said. “Essentially, it was executive branch legal activism. They would take cases or regulations or statutes and expand or redefine the meaning of words in them to advance the agenda that they thought ought to be advanced — an agenda that often had zero chance of passing Congress, where...

'Doing better than Ronald Reagan' to cut rules! Under the Obama administration, the White House, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies repeatedly circumvented Congress by using guidance memos to create de facto regulations, changing laws without going through the review process. In less than a year, however, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back government overreach, Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, told WND. “Guidance typically from the department means there is some question about how to do this, because of the way it was ambiguously written, so a federal agency would provide...

President Donald Trump’s White House has, according to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney, removed or withdrawn about 860 Obama administration-era federal regulations. The massive decrease in regulations is part of the Trump administration’s overall deregulatory agenda, Mulvaney said during a press briefing Thursday. Updating reporters on President Trump’s 2-for-1 policy for federal regulations — which requires cutting two regulations for every one new implemented regulation — Mulvaney said we are at 16-to-1, Breitbart News’s Michelle Moons reports. Speaking to the “slow accretion, that slow cancer that can come from regulatory burdens that we put on our...

President Trump's administration, on orders to kill two regulations for every new one, ripped up the playbook during its first six months, eliminating 16 old rules for every new one, according to top officials. "It's really the beginning of a kind of fundamental regulatory reform and a reorientation of where we're going with regulation," said Neomi Rao, the newly installed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. In a briefing with a handful of reporters, Rao laid out the administration's regulation agenda, declaring, "It's a beginning ... you're going to see...

President Donald Trump ordered the Treasury Department on Friday to examine two controversial powers given to financial regulators in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, including a bailout authority widely favored by the biggest banks. One of the memos Trump signed Friday takes aim at the “Orderly liquidation authority” or OLA, which authorizes the federal government to take over and wind down a failing financial firm. It instructs Treasury to examine whether OLA encourages excessive risk-taking or exposes taxpayers to liability. It also orders Treasury not to use OLAA while the review is underway. OLA has been a target...

EXECUTIVE ORDER - - - - - - - IDENTIFYING AND REDUCING TAX REGULATORY BURDENS By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Policy. The Federal tax system should be simple, fair, efficient, and pro-growth. The purposes of tax regulations should be to bring clarity to the already complex Internal Revenue Code (title 26, United States Code) and to provide useful guidance to taxpayers. Contrary to these purposes, numerous tax regulations issued over the last several years have effectively increased...

The Trump administration is expected to begin rolling back stringent federal regulations on vehicle pollution that contributes to global warming, according to people familiar with the matter, essentially marking a U-turn to efforts to force the American auto industry to produce more electric cars. The announcement — which is expected as soon as Tuesday and will be made jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, and the transportation secretary, Elaine L. Chao — will immediately start to undo one of former President Barack Obama’s most significant environmental legacies. During the same week, and possibly on the same day,...

President Donald Trump's executive order to eliminate two regulations for every new rule could result in zero net regulatory costs this fiscal year, a stunning shift in regulatory policy from the previous Obama administration. The American Action Forum released a report Tuesday showing how Executive Order 13771 could significantly roll back regulatory burdens, using 2006 as a model. The "Getting to $0" report written by Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the American Action Forum, finds that through the executive orders on regulation and the Congressional Review Act, the administration could reduce net regulatory costs to zero by Oct....

After a pompous, liberal agenda was crammed down the throats of the American people during his first two years in office, President Obama suffered staggering losses in Congress for the next six years that cost Democrats control of both houses. But, heavy Democrat losses, courtesy of an electorate that vehemently rejected a far-left agenda, didn't stop Obama from continuing to push through countless new rules and regulations from the White House all while pushing his authority to the brink of every Constitutional boundary known to man. Of course, the problem with "legislating from the White House" is that all those...

THE BIG STORY House Republicans unveiled their plan of attack against Obama-era regulations Wednesday, highlighting the top rules they plan to roll back. The Labor Department's blacklisting rule, Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) stream protection rule, Interior Department's methane emissions rule, a disclosure rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and an obscure gun regulation from the Social Security Administration (SSA) top the list of regulations Republicans are targeting. GOP lawmakers will turn to the Congressional Review Act to strike down these rules.

As soon as President Trump signed his executive order calling for two regulations to be eliminated for every new one enacted, the usual suspects started to complain. Union of Concerned Scientists President Ken Kimmell called it "absurd, imposing a Sophie's Choice on federal agencies." William Gale of the left-of-center Brookings Institution complained that "there's no logic to this." Public Citizen head Robert Weissman called Trump's order "unworkable," "harmful," "unprecedented and untested," and "horrifying." "Americans will once again have to pay the price for the consequences of corporate recklessness, greed and lawbreaking," Weissman added for good measure. Trump's executive order, signed...

President Donald Trump (C) leads a meeting with invited business leaders and members of his staff in the Roosevelt Room at the White House January 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. Business leaders included Elon Musk of SpaceX, Wendell Weeks of Corning, Mark Sutton of International Paper, Andrew Liveris of Dow Chemical, Alex Gorsky of Johnston & Johnson and others. Trump meets with CEOs and pledges to cut taxes 'massively' President Donald Trump on Monday told a range of business leaders that he believes his administration can cut regulations by 75 percent or "maybe more." At the White House with 10...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump told leaders of companies ranging from defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp to sportswear apparel maker Under Armour Inc on Monday that he believed his administration could cut U.S. regulations governing companies by 75 percent or more. In a meeting with about 10 senior executives at the White House, Trump also reiterated his pledge to impose a hefty border tax on companies that want to import products to the United States after moving American manufacturing facilities abroad. But, he added, those that want to set up factories in the United States will see quick...