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On February 18, President Donald Trump issued another seemingly technocratic executive order regarding the structure of our government. This one purportedly asserts presidential control over so-called independent regulatory agencies — or administrative offices that Congress has intentionally designed to be insulated against direct day-to-day control from the president.

President Donald Trump seeks to halt Congress’ support for tax credits, grants, and loans that are supporting a transition to clean transportation, a transition necessary to achieving public health standards and reducing the transportation sector’s substantial contribution to increasingly catastrophic climate change. It will be up to Congress to stand up to the president’s pressure and preserve its support for critical environmental and economic investments.

As described in Part I, President Trump’s attack on clean vehicles, introduced in his executive order on “Unleashing American Energy,” will undermine progress in achieving healthy air and reducing climate emissions. The executive order requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to consider regulatory changes to vehicle emission standards that would eliminate what he calls the “EV mandate.”

President Donald Trump’s attack on electric vehicles threatens not only the nation’s progress in fighting climate change, but torpedoes our ability to achieve healthy air. The Inauguration Day executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” calls for eliminating the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” and “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government distortions that favor EVs ….” Slowing our transition to clean vehicles will have the worst consequences for vulnerable frontline communities living near highways, ports, and warehouses, communities that already experience a disproportionate share of environmental harms.

On January 20 — otherwise known as Day One of Trump 2.0 — the president signed a barrage of executive orders, including one declaring a national energy emergency. While it is unsurprising that his policy priorities will reflect his long-standing antipathy toward climate protections and renewables — not to mention the fossil fuel industry’s financial support during his campaign — his attempt to frame this policy by declaring a “national energy emergency” is beyond disingenuous. We have faced real threats to energy security in the past and have weathered them through democratic processes, not by executive fiat, and this isn’t one.

On February 6, the U.S. Senate confirmed Russell Vought as the next director of the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has been at the epicenter of the Trump administration’s push to remake the federal government in an authoritarian image.

Over the course of two posts, I have explored in detail my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order last Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. Remarkably, the order is still not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I offer my final set of observations on what the order is likely to mean during the second Trump administration.

In my previous post, I began exploring some of my major takeaways from the new “10-out, 1-in” executive order. President Donald Trump sort of announced the order Friday night with a Fact Sheet, but not the actual order itself. At this point, the order is not on the White House website but can be viewed on a third-party website. In this post, I will offer some additional observations and analysis.

The second Trump administration’s disastrous early-term actions do nothing to address the economic inequality that our political classes have long ignored. In its first two weeks, the administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, reversed federal initiatives on environmental justice, withheld public health information, frozen spending on environmental and climate mitigation programs, threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, and just recently threatened to fire more than 1,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers who focus on climate and environmental enforcement.