President Trump this week directed 10 federal agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — to implement a novel procedure to scrap a wide array of longstanding energy and environmental regulations.
He told agencies that oversee everything from gas pipelines to power plants to insert “sunset” provisions that would cause regulations to automatically expire by October 2026. If the agencies wanted to keep a rule, it could only be extended for a maximum of five years at a time.
Experts say the directive faces enormous legal hurdles. But it was one of three executive orders from Mr. Trump on Wednesday in which he declared that he was pursuing new shortcuts to weaken or eliminate regulations.
In another order, he directed a rollback of federal rules that limit the water flow in shower heads with a highly unusual legal justification: Because I say so.
“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal,” Mr. Trump’s order said.
Legal experts called that sentence astonishing and contrary to decades of federal law. The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to go through a lengthy “notice and comment” process when they issue, revise or repeal major rules, giving the public a chance to weigh in. Agencies that do not follow those procedures often find their actions blocked by the courts.
“On its face, all of this is totally illegal,” said Jody Freeman, the director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former White House official under President Barack Obama. “Either the real lawyers have left the building or they just don’t care and want to take a flier on all these cases and see if the courts will bite.”
