President-elect Donald Trump announced this week he’ll reverse a flood of Obama-era regulations, some of which impact agriculture. The new President is expected to rescind some Obama rules on ‘day one,’ and he says he will phase others out gradually.
“On regulation I will formulate a rule which says for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated. So important.”
President Obama’s Administration has issued thousands of pages of regulations so far this year, and National Pork Producers Council spokesperson Dave Warner says it’s time to rein it all in.
“For the past eight years we’ve been concerned about over regulation. There have been a lot of regulations coming out of EPA, air emission reporting rules, of course the Waters of the United States Rule. If it were to go into effect it would fundamentally change all of agriculture.”
NPPC, the American Farm Bureau and others fought the Environmental Protection Agency and its Administrator Gina McCarthy for years on the Waters of the U.S. Rule, alleging the agency waged a political campaign to rally public support for a vast expansion of its control of the nation’s waters.
WOTUS remains on hold in the federal courts, and President-elect Trump has signaled he would sign legislation to end the rule. Trump also promised during his campaign to appoint a farmer-friendly EPA administrator.