President Joe Biden shared his road map for upcoming regulations that are under threat by a potential second Trump administration.
The White House on Friday released the spring Unified Agenda, showing agencies’ timelines for rules dealing with everything from natural gas power plants to household appliances. The document comes as Biden is in a fierce campaign dogfight with former President Donald Trump, who plans to pull back many of the rules if he wins the race.
The regulatory agenda “can usually best be seen as a wish list,” which is particularly tricky during an election year, said Stuart Shapiro, a dean and public policy professor at Rutgers University…
The White House on Friday released the spring Unified Agenda, showing agencies’ timelines for rules dealing with everything from natural gas power plants to household appliances. The document comes as Biden is in a fierce campaign dogfight with former President Donald Trump, who plans to pull back many of the rules if he wins the race.
The regulatory agenda “can usually best be seen as a wish list,” which is particularly tricky during an election year, said Stuart Shapiro, a dean and public policy professor at Rutgers University.
“The time frames listed there are usually ambitious, and administrations rarely complete anything near their complete list of intended actions,” Shapiro told POLITICO’s E&E News. “I find it is best seen as signaling to interest groups, ‘This is what we want to do.’”
This agenda also arrives after the Biden administration completed a regulatory sprint this spring as energy and environmental agencies finalized significant rules. That push was crucial to the president’s legacy, shielding those regulations from being overturned quickly next year if he loses the White House.
Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can offer resolutions to ax rules, including if they were finalized during the law’s “look-back” window of the previous session’s last 60 legislative days. Some experts say that window has already opened, while others believe it could come later this summer. That deadline will be determined by when Congress adjourns later this year.
If Trump were to become president again and his GOP allies made gains on Capitol Hill, they could use that part of the law in 2025 to attack Biden’s regulations finalized late in his term.
“Now that the Congressional Review Act deadline is nearing, anything not yet issued is at risk of repeal if Trump wins and the GOP takes Congress,” Shapiro said. “If Biden wins, the agenda is a decent list of what he would try to do in a second term.”
E&E News by Politico, July 8, 2024