“We call them regulations. ” This is the last chance to put those regulations on the books before Trump’s management adjustments. Biden’s management,” said Isaac Arnsdorf, a research reporter for ProPublica, who created an online database that tracks existing regulations for the nonprofit news site. “They can be reversed, but not easily. “
They come with devout exemptions for federal contractors under labor discrimination laws; more flexible water power criteria for showers and washing machines; and stricter eligibility for food stamps, even when millions of people who came out of the pandemic tables turn to the government for help.
“The last days of an administration are incredibly important, and it’s just natural to have to do things,” said Carol Browner, former EPA administrator during the 8 years of the Clinton administration and also a former member of President Barack Obama’s transition. team and the first tsar of time.
“But he’s not on the loose to do it voluntarily. There is the law, the science, the process,” Browner said.
Experts have said the gross number of last-minute regulatory adjustments seems, so far, to be on par with what has happened in recent weeks of the Obama administration.
Many of the most important last-minute regulations on environmental and clinical policies, adding a debatable effort to prohibit the use of any clinical examination by the EPA that does not fully disclose all raw underlying data. His defenders call it a step towards transparency, while critics call it censorship.
Studies on the effect of contaminants on human life, for example, depend on sensitive non-public medical data, which patients do not need to publicly disclose.
“Possibly you wouldn’t get the quality of science that the EPA wants to make resolutions, and it’s a very, very intentional resolution on your part, on behalf of polluters, which is to restrict science and therefore restrict the EPA’s ability to make resolutions. the smartest resolution, ” said Browner.
The Trump administration is also rushing to auction drilling rights at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a strongly opposed measure through Biden, in an effort to get the next administration removed from expanded oil and fuel development.
“To the extent that the rents have been completed, you might have to buy them back,” Browner said, “but I hope the truth is that we can continue to protect those spaces that have been there for many years. “
The president is also seeking to increase his crackdown on immigration. In recent weeks, he added 8 new questions to the citizenship check and tried to make it more difficult to download visas for highly professional foreign workers.
“In this last-minute rush before the inauguration, Trump’s leadership is doing everything it can to bring legal immigration ever closer to the bare minimum,” said Ali Noorani, president and ceo of the National Immigration Forum, a nonpartisan defense. “He’s rushing compliance actions and is actually looking to do everything he can to end up checking one’s boxes and make it as complicated as you can imagine for Biden’s administration to rebuild the country’s immigration system. “
In foreign policy, Trump reduced the number of U. S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no more than 2,500 U. S. troops planned in each country until the end of the year. While withdrawal was a key promise from the 2016 campaign, experts said. the overdue resolution puts Biden in the difficult position of having to take up a resolution to redistribute troops to the theater at the beginning of his first term.
Former outgoing President George W. Bush, in one situation, referred to his successor, Obama, in late 2008 on whether to approve a troop inlet into Afghanistan.
Trump has also taken steps to officially open the door to a two-decade treaty he has long criticized, fleeing the “Open Skies Treaty” last month, which allowed the United States and Russia to conduct mutually surveillance flights to build trust. Critics say the resolution is a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Russia has joined the treaty, so until it joins, we will withdraw,” Trump said in May.
“The challenge is that if we don’t respect our own treaties, if we don’t recognize our own treaties, then who on the foreign network will have to marry us in the future?” said retired Admiral Bill McCraven, who oversaw the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Some of Trump’s latest moves will have an ongoing impact.
The Justice Department is quick to execute as many federal death row inmates as you can imagine before Biden has a chance to re-impose a moratorium on the death penalty.
Eight federal prisoners have been executed, so this year, the maximum in more than a century, and five more are expected to die before Inauguration Day next month.
“The speed of these federal executions is unprecedented,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Independent and Nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. “The last time more than one user was executed, an era of transition leads us to Grover Cleveland’s first presidency in the last decade of 1880. “
The Trump administration, in an expired rule change, also gives executioners greater flexibility in the way they kill.
“Regulations will allow them to challenge, use any deadly injection method they want,” Dunham said.
Meanwhile, Trump continues with a record number of lifetime appointments to federal courts, breaking with 123 years of precedent by confirming even more judges in the Senate after wasting his re-election.
“Usually, once elections are held, confirmations are prevented until the next Congress,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an independent judicial control body. “It’s hard to know precisely what effect it will have on Trump-appointed judges we have now, but we know it’s going to be big, it’s going to be huge, it’s going to be generational. “
Some of Trump’s final acts face demanding situations in court, and if Democrats win in the Senate, accelerated repeals of newly refined regulations may occur, but experts say maximum policy adjustments may not be easily reversed.
“You have to start over with the total rule-making procedure, which takes years, a lot of resources and is bulky in design,” Arnsdorf said.
The procedure reminds us that the strength of the presidency can have a lasting effect in the United States until the last minute of the transition to the White House.
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