This post is the second in a three-part series. Read the first part here.
In the first post of this series, I began detailing President Donald’s Trump’s comprehensive effort to build from a scratch a new regulatory system that systematically favors his administration’s antiregulatory agenda. As I explained, he has issued several executive orders that fundamentally distort the key building blocks that comprise our regulatory system: law; science; economics; and the career civil service.
In the first post, I examined the executive orders specifically affecting the “law” building block. In this post, I examine the next two building blocks: science and economics.
Science
Properly understood, regulatory decision-making involves a mixture of legal and policy analysis. If legal analysis tells what the agency can or must do, policy analysis helps us to understand what the effects of the action would be (though, obviously, the two lines are necessarily intertwined.)
For many regulations, science — understood broadly to include the various branches of natural and physical sciences as well as statistics — often forms one of the key ingredients in policy analysis. It provides us with the tools for understanding the problems that a regulation is intended to solve and for working out effective ways for redressing those problems.
As with any human tool, though, science is not perfect. Often, it helps us reduce uncertainty around policy problems, but rarely, if ever, can we eliminate uncertainty altogether. For policymakers, then, there must be humility over what science can accomplish.
At the same time, though, science can only help policymakers if it is allowed to be conducted free of politicized interference. It is only in overcoming the uncertainty that remains, which science cannot completely resolve, that more subjective considerations like values and ethics pick up the baton to carry regulatory decision-making over the finish line.
Trump’s defining executive order on science, euphemistically referred to as “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” rejects all of these ideas about the proper role of science in regulatory decision-making. Instead, it establishes across-the-board requirements for agencies to follow when developing or using scientific studies to inform these decisions. It rescinds all previously existing scientific integrity policies from the Biden administration, laying to rest any doubts about whether this is a political document. (And if you still harbor any doubts on this score, the order’s gratuitous attack on respect for DEI principles in science should fully unburden you.)
Notably, these requirements appear to embrace the verbiage of broadly accepted scientific integrity principles, but, upon closer inspection, actually subvert them in ways intended to reinforce anti-regulatory actions. For example, the order invokes the importance of accounting for uncertainty in science. But rather than use this matter to refine or improve decision-making, the likely goal is to stifle all regulations by denying agencies any ability to take precautionary measures to protect the public, even when the underlying science for a given rule lacks complete certainty.
The real tell that Trump’s science order is not a serious commitment to scientific integrity principles is that it commits supervision and enforcement of its requirements to political appointees at agencies. If the bottom line of scientific integrity is to insulate apolitical science from political interference, this is the last thing you would do.
Economics
As with science, economics is another key ingredient in policy analysis and development. This, of course, is not meant to endorse the use of cost-benefit analysis. Rather, nearly all authorizing statutes for regulations require agencies to consider economic impacts of rules — both good and bad — in some form. And, as no less than former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted, how those impacts are accounted are often committed to the discretion of the agency by the authorizing statute.
Also, as with science, economic analysis can be manipulated to systematically favor certain substantive ends. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is taking steps toward controlling how agencies account for the economic impacts of their planned rules so as to deliver reliably anti-regulatory results.
The basic strategy isn’t merely to force agencies to adhere to strict cost-benefit analysis requirements — which is anti-regulatory enough — but to pervert its methodologies so that they are even more heavily tilted against effective safeguards. To that end, in the “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies” executive order referred to in the previous post, Trump took the step of formally subjecting independent agencies (as distinct from executive branch agencies) to cost-benefit analysis requirements supervised by the White House Office of Information Regulatory Affairs. Historically, these agencies were exempted from these requirements, out of respect for congressional design to insulate these agencies from politicized interference by the president.
Beyond this, Trump has issued two more executive orders that rig the rules of how agencies conduct cost-benefit analysis to reinforce its anti-regulatory orientation. Among its many provisions, the 10-out, 1-in executive order noted in the previous post revoked the Biden administration’s updates to Circular A-4, a kind of instruction manual for agencies to follow when conducting cost-benefit analysis on their rules. As such, it reinstated the prior version from 2003. This is significant because the Biden revisions included several methodological changes that helped mitigate the inherent anti-regulatory bias of cost-benefit analysis.
For instance, it gave agencies greater freedom to avoid monetizing non-market regulatory impacts, provided new tools for considering the distributional impacts of regulations, and offered expanded justifications for regulations beyond conventional market failure concerns, such as promoting civil rights and social equity.
In addition, Trump’s Day One executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” contained several provisions aimed at eliminating potential regulatory barriers to fossil fuel development and use in the United States. Tellingly, one of these provisions called on the EPA to consider ending the use of the social cost of carbon (SCC), which is used in cost-benefit analysis to account for the value of halting greenhouse gas emissions. (A guidance formally ending the use of the SCC was issued in May.) The upshot is that when the administration moves to eliminate an existing rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it will appear to have no “costs” in the cost-benefit analysis (i.e., no costs that take the form of “forgone benefits” of not preventing climate change), but it will have “benefits” in the form of regulatory costs averted. This will obviously make it easier to defend these rollbacks on economic grounds.
In the final post in this series, I will look at the impact of Trump’s executive orders affecting the use of the career civil service to advance his administration’s deregulatory agenda.
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James Goodwin | June 17, 2025
In the first post of this series, I began detailing President Donald’s Trump’s comprehensive effort to build from a scratch a new regulatory system that systematically favors his administration’s antiregulatory agenda. As I explained, he has issued several executive orders that fundamentally distort the key building blocks that comprise our regulatory system: law; science; economics; and the career civil service. In the first post, I examined the executive orders specifically affecting the “law” building block. In this post, I examine the next two building blocks: science and economics.
Catalina Gonzalez | June 16, 2025
However dispiriting the federal pullback of critical climate funding currently feels, it’s essential to play the long game and continue to develop effective strategies for an ongoing clean energy transition.
James Goodwin | June 16, 2025
During his first term, President Donald Trump encountered for the first time the modern regulatory system that Congress has slowly built up over the last century. What he found was that its commitment to rule of law principles, democratic input, and reason-based decision-making presented a formidable barrier to his administration’s agenda of rolling back protective measures that millions of us depend on to keep our workplaces safe, our drinking water free of contaminants, and our bank accounts guarded against cheats and scams. That experience clearly left an impression. With the help of Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and other White House advisors, Trump has spent the first few months of his second term issuing a dizzying array of executive orders aimed at building, piece by piece, the kind of regulatory system that he would like to have — one that is strongly biased against promoting the public interest.
Sophie Loeb | June 11, 2025
North Carolinians are facing more threats to our clean energy future at both the state and federal levels.
Shelley Welton | June 10, 2025
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and like-minded thinkers advanced the idea of publicly owned utilities as a “yardstick” against which private utilities’ performance could be measured. When private utilities fell short, the threat of public power would discipline these entities into better behavior, or would result in full-out replacement by utilities owned and controlled by municipalities, state entities, or the federal government. This theory animated an impressive array of New Deal efforts at rural electrification, in which the government directly built out large-scale public electricity generation and funded communities to create their own local power systems in areas of the country that private utilities refused to serve.
James Goodwin | June 6, 2025
There are many reasons why Senate Republicans’ recent decision to defy the parliamentarian and repeal California’s Clean Air Act waivers using the Congressional Review Act (CRA) was objectionable. But one objection that hasn’t received enough – any? – attention is how legislative gimmicks like the CRA contribute to the broader problem of congressional dysfunction.
Minor Sinclair | May 29, 2025
Never before in our lifetimes has the rule of law felt so tenuous. These are not normal times for a research and advocacy organization dedicated to “harnessing the power of law and public policy to create a responsive government, healthy environment and just society.” Many of the policy ideas that we have championed — for example, worker safety protections, a fair regulatory system, climate actions that address equity concerns — have been adopted in some form. And today, these policies, as well as the democratic institutions which enforce them, are under threat.
Federico Holm | May 27, 2025
Since our last update on May 19, we have seen some critical developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In addition to the relentless progression of some resolutions towards becoming law, the most troublesome was the decision in the Senate to vote on the CRA resolutions ending Clean Air Act waivers issued to California. As James Goodwin said in a recent blog post on the matter, this represents a clear example of Senate Republicans “failing to follow the rules that they agreed to — and doing so to advance their policy agenda without heed to the rule of law wreckage they leave in their wake."
James Goodwin | May 22, 2025
The disease of authoritarianism now afflicting our democracy spread to yet another of our governing institutions the night of May 21. Do not be fooled: The debate over Senate Republicans' misuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) is not “inside baseball” or wonky or even complicated. Rather, it’s a simple story of legislators failing to follow the rules that they agreed to — and doing so to advance their policy agenda without heed to the rule of law wreckage they leave in their wake.