ENVIRONMENT/LEGAL/OBAMA ADMIN/REGULATIONS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The Trump administration has taken great pride in dismantling regulations issued during the Obama years, particularly rules designed to protect the environment or consumers. Federal agencies have spent the past two-plus years targeting rules designed to make chemical plants safer, conserve natural gas at oil and mining facilities and improve compliance with fuel economy standards, among many others. But that process has been falling apart in court. By the most recent count, the administration has either lost or given up in 34 out of 36 deregulatory cases, a win rate of just over 5 percent. Despite that low success rate, the administration is actually winning — at least some of the time. That’s because the administration has learned to use delaying tactics to undermine and even repeal federal regulations it doesn’t like, even when judges rule against it in court. In effect, the administration has adopted a winning deregulatory strategy that can be summed up as: If you can’t beat them, stall them. This delay game has played out a number of different ways. One of the administration’s favored methods is something of a bureaucratic whack-a-mole. Under this approach, an agency delays the implementation of an Obama-era regulation and when sued, quickly withdraws the first delay and issues a new one or a full repeal of the rule to avoid losing the court battle over the first delay.”
–Bethany Davis Noll, “Trump’s regulatory ‘whack-a-mole’,” Politico, April 10, 2019 5:13 am