With President Trump's cabinet officials distributed throughout the government to lead various agencies, there is no doubt that the effort it takes to try and keep up with how many of those cabinet members are successfully able to push Trump's agenda can be overwhelming. One point of focus is on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which already has Scott Pruitt blatantly attempting to roll back more than 30 Obama era regulations under the orders of President Trump since he was made the director of the agency. The focus has been over the last week when it was reported that Pruitt was dealt a defeat by the appeals court to freeze a methane rule.
Unprecedented deregulation
That rule requires that fossil fuel companies checked their equipment for methane leaks, which Pruitt wanted to get rid of because quite plainly, he said it was costly to those companies in the industry. One article by Mother Jones titled: "A jaw-dropping list of all the terrible things Trump has done to mother earth," refers to former EPA administration under the George W. Bush administration, Christine Todd Whitman, who said that Pruitt and Trump are undermining science and they don't seem to care. She added that every administration reshapes regulations that the inherit from a previous administration but that the kind of rollback seen from the Trump administration is unprecedented.
EPA against the courts
Rebecca Leber who is a reporter for Mother Jones said that the court's decision could be a sign of the obstacles Pruitt will face as he tries to get around the Law. In freezing the methane rule, the court decided that Pruitt violated the Clean Air Act of 1970 which the court saw as him trying to amend or revoke a rule without going through the proper procedures cited in the act.
Pruitt has also come under scrutiny from certain members of the Senate who were pressured by their constituents in rural areas effected by his freeze. The director for the National Resources Defense Council, John Walke, tweeted that Pruitt has had some of the worst win-loss records so far, referring to him losing on rules he wanted to freeze on regulating mercury, pesticides and now with methane.
The same Mother Jones article mentioned, Pruitt has a lot of wins for the Trump administration regarding rolling back regulations starting in February. The NRDC wrote an article titled: "Misrule of law: how Scott Pruitt yanks our vital safeguards", which said that there is a pattern with Pruitt's efforts to rollback regulation where he goes around the laws in order to stall and delay certain rules in order to exhaust the process in the courts. Through this action, Pruitt has been able to get some of his rollbacks enabled and has some successes to brag about. With an emboldened Trump administration, there is no doubt that they will continue to test for vulnerabilities in the system.
