Amid pandemic, Trump administration muzzles communities: “While the eyes of the entire nation
— and the entire world — are rightfully fixed on the ongoing global pandemic caused by the coronavirus, the Trump administration is moving ahead, behind our backs, with policy changes that will worsen public health and could silence communities across the
country. When we emerge from social distancing and return to our normal lives, we may find that some rights and protections we had taken for granted have vanished while no one was looking. One such protection that is now under threat is the National Environmental
Policy Act (NEPA). In January 2020, the administration proposed to dramatically curtail the input that communities like mine can provide for federal construction projects through NEPA — and now, Trump’s appointees are hard at work to finalize this terrible
proposal. Before NEPA existed, federal infrastructure dollars were used to bulldoze and evict communities of color and low-income families in cities across the country and to erect literal barriers to jobs and economic opportunity without any input from affected
citizens. My community of Rondo in St. Paul was one of them. My community was a vibrant black community that sprang up during the Great Migration of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. By the 1930s, half of St. Paul’s black population lived in Rondo.
It then became an oasis of working and middle-class families — one of the most dynamic black communities west of the Mississippi River. It was a railroad town that was unionized thanks to the Pullman porters. It was an intellectually curious town and a black
haven, the Rondo we created.”
[Minneapolis Star Tribune, 5/20/20]
http://strib.mn/2zTsjvQ
The small Native American tribe fighting Trump's wall in South Texas: “When President Trump
announced plans to build a wall along the Rio Grande River, Juan Mancias smelled a rat. Mancias is the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribal leader and a founding member of the Texas chapter of the American Indian Movement — not to mention an experienced human rights advocate
and Native rights activist. When Trump first touted his plans to run a border wall through South Texas back in October 2018, Mancias couldn’t make sense of how this new construction would help protect the border, where his family has lived for generations.
Through some document digging, though, he’d eventually uncover a possible alternative reason the government was so desperately seeking a border fence in this area — and Mancias thinks it has little to do with national security. The land in question spans 1,954
miles in Texas along the state’s border with Mexico. It snakes through Cameron, Starr, and Hidalgo counties, passing through the city of Brownsville and up to McAllen. Included in this region are multiple Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe burial sites stretching from
the Garcia Pasture down to the Eli Jackson Cemetery. The Carrizo/Comecrudo people were in Texas long before the Spanish colonists or any other white folks set foot on their land; the entire Rio Grande Valley is their ancestral home.”
[Policy Mic, 5/20/20]
https://bit.ly/2ymNx4P
Can Trump kill rules in a pandemic? Experts doubt it: “The executive order President Trump
signed Tuesday is either an election-year messaging gimmick or the return of a regulatory strategy that piled up legal defeats for EPA in the administration's first years, experts say. Trump promised his Cabinet that the order would give them "tremendous power
to cut regulation," either temporarily or permanently, to revive a flagging economy. But experts — and even the executive order itself — is clear that nothing in the order changes the legal procedure for making and killing rules…Myron Ebell, who headed Trump's
EPA transition team, told E&E News that the Trump administration could use those powers to immediately roll back regulations outside of the usual rulemaking process, delivering final rulemakings in much less than the standard time frame of a year or longer.
But Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, said the APA sets strict criteria for when and how agencies can use emergency powers. The procedural statute requires an agency to satisfy
something called the "good cause" provision in order to shorten its notice and comment process for a rulemaking. Trump's order seems to suggest that the administration is poised to argue that economic recovery following the pandemic is "good cause" to suspend
the usual rulemaking process, perhaps for a wide swath of federal rulemakings. But Noll said courts were unlikely to agree. "Courts have interpreted that provision to be very narrow and to not allow agencies to use the good cause requirements for very many
reasons," she said. "An agency basically has to say, 'It's impossible for us for reasons outside our control to issue notice and comment in time.'" The exemption is usually limited to circumstances where there is an acute health or safety risk. For example,
courts upheld a bid by air travel security agencies to move a rule to address an imminent hazard outside of the usual rulemaking process.”
[E&E News, 5/21/20]
https://bit.ly/2ZqmsJa
Trump uses virus to permanently suspend rules on industry: “President Trump instructed federal
agencies yesterday to search for regulations they could suspend or kill in hopes of jolting the U.S. economy out of its pandemic stupor. "The virus has attacked our nation's economy as well as its health," the president proclaimed in an executive order that
directs agency heads to look for rules "that may inhibit economic recovery." The order permits rules to be suspended temporarily or permanently to aid economic activity and job creation. Trump signed the order at a Cabinet meeting at the White House yesterday
afternoon. "We're fighting for the livelihoods of American workers, and we must continue to cut through every piece of red tape that stands in our way," he said at the meeting. Under Trump, EPA has rolled back numerous regulations for air, water and chemicals
in the name of streamlining them, and it has proposed to do more. Myron Ebell, who led Trump's EPA transition team in 2016, told E&E News yesterday that the agency had already consulted with the White House on possible rules to freeze under this order. Ebell,
who heads the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the order would allow Trump to use the emergency powers of a procedural statute to quickly jettison regulations without being encumbered by the usual rulemaking process,
which normally takes a year. "It could speed up things that are in the grinder now, but if there are creative Cabinet officials and agency officials who could identify other deregulatory actions that would help economic growth, then they can put those on the
same fast track to implementation and not spend years and years trying to get them done," he said. The White House has reached out to conservative groups for help identifying rules that could be rolled back, even if they have nothing to do with the coronavirus
crisis, observers said. Ebell said conservative groups were briefed on the action yesterday prior to the order's release. He provided possible targets, including provisions of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.
Anti-regulatory groups are now preparing ideas to submit to the administration, he said.”
[E&E News, 5/20/20]
https://bit.ly/2XjUHPA
Presidential order on aquaculture draws environmental concerns for Gulf fisheries: “The
federal waters of the United States are free of aquaculture farms, but a new executive order from President Donald Trump could hasten attempts by fish farm companies to take the plunge. Southwest Florida could be at the forefront of the push for more farms
as a pilot program works through a permitting process. Environmental groups worry the order will greenlight offshore operations, creating concentrated sources of pollution and putting wild species at risk. The executive order on Promoting American Seafood
Competitiveness and Economic Growth was signed May 7 and, among other items, proposes to remove “outdated and unnecessarily burdensome regulations” and streamline aquaculture permitting. Ocean Era, formerly Kampachi Farms, is waiting on permits for its pilot
finfish farm, Velella Epsilon. The farm will be about 41 miles southwest of Sarasota in the Gulf of Mexico and raise 88,000 pounds of almaco jack fish each year. Neil Sims, founder and CEO of Ocean Era, told the Daily News that the Velella Epsilon project
will consist of a demonstration pen where the farmed fish will be held. The pen will measure 20 feet deep and 50 feet across. It will be able to be submerged about 7 meters, or 20 feet. “The executive order streamlines the permitting by … placing a 2-year
time limit on environmental review, rather than it being open ended,” Sims wrote. “This is not unreasonable, given that (California’s programmatic environmental impact statement) for offshore aquaculture in state waters is now about 12 years into the process,
with no end in sight.’ However, senior oceans campaigner for the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth said the administration should not cut corners on environmental reviews. “You can’t rush these. I think that’s a really big problem they’re trying
to circumvent,” Hallie Templeton said. The president’s executive order is vague on what regulations it would remove or streamline, leaving policy counsel Rosanna Neil of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance worried the industry will expand without much oversight.”
[Fort Myers News Press, 5/20/20]
https://bit.ly/2yqz3Rs
BLM proposes lease sale under Texas lakes: “The Bureau of Land Management is again proposing
to sell oil and gas leases under two Texas lakes, and environmental groups are calling foul. The BLM New Mexico oil and gas lease sale slated for August includes three mineral parcels, suggested by developers, that would dip under Somerville Lake northwest
of Austin and Lewisville Lake north of Dallas, which provides drinking water to millions of people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Lewisville Lake, a reservoir created by damming a tributary of the Trinity River in the 1920s and 1950s, is owned by the U.S.
government and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. The underlying minerals, however, are managed by the Bureau of Land Management. BLM conducted an environmental assessment on the proposed parcels for the sale — 10 parcels across six counties in Oklahoma
and Texas — and found "no significant impact," though air quality degradation, spill hazards, traffic, occasional fires and hydraulic fracturing fluid leaks were noted as potential fallout from drilling and production. BLM argued the region is already significantly
developed and the roughly 10 horizontal wells estimated to be drilled in the parcels offered in the upcoming sale were a small addition to overall oil and gas development in the area. But the lease sale has stoked ire from environmental groups who say hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking — the drilling technique used in most new oil and gas wells — poses a risk to the water resources. "A so-called Finding of No Significant Impact is a cruel joke on Texans who depend on these water resources for recreation and drinking
water needs," said Cyrus Reed, interim director of the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, in a statement. "It is outlandish that in the middle of a pandemic and an oil and gas pricing collapse, the BLM is proposing to move forward on again trying to frack oil
and gas under Texas's public waters used for local and state park recreation, fishing, swimming and public water uses.’”
[E&E News, 5/21/20]
https://bit.ly/2ymkled
Biotech developers to self-determine crop exemptions: “Biotech developers can decide for
themselves whether crops are exempt from federal scrutiny under the USDA’s new regulatory structure for genetic engineering. Even those crops that must be reviewed by USDA will often be simpler to introduce, since many won’t have to undergo the costly deregulatory
process that genetically engineered plant traits previously faced. “It’s not as expensive, it’s not as time-consuming. It’s no longer one-size-fits-all,” said Clint Nesbitt, senior director of science and regulatory affairs for food and agriculture at the
Biotechnology Industry Organization. These same changes have also raised concerns among critics of federal biotech oversight, who fear the USDA has abdicated much of its regulatory power over genetically modified organisms — potentially exacerbating export
market disruptions and herbicide resistance in weeds. “They’re intentionally trying to avoid using their authority to deal with the issues with GMOs we’ve seen in recent years,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst with the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit
that’s critical of USDA biotech oversight. Under the previous regulations, crops genetically engineered with plant pests, such as agrobacterium, were considered regulated articles that needed federal permits for field trials and interstate shipping. Before
they could be commercialized, regulated crops had to go through a USDA deregulation process that often took years and required extensive analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act. Crops that weren’t modified with plant pests — such as those altered
with gene guns or gene editing techniques — could avoid this process if the developer confirmed with USDA that these plants weren’t regulated articles. Under the new rules, which became final May 18 and will be fully phased in by October 2021, biotech developers
can self-determine whether crops are exempt from USDA review. They can also voluntary ask the agency to confirm the product is exempt.”
[Capital Press, 5/20/20]
https://bit.ly/2WT9e61
Judge rejects Trump administration attempt to toss endangered species lawsuit: “A federal
judge has rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to dismiss a challenge to its rollback of endangered species protections, ruling late Monday that the 17-state lawsuit can proceed. The August rule significantly weakens protections under the landmark Endangered
Species Act, allowing economic factors to be weighed before adding an animal to the list and limiting how aspects such as climate change can be considered in listing decisions. It also weakens protections for threatened species that are at risk of becoming
endangered. “When a species goes extinct, there’s no turning back the clock,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a Tuesday release. “In California, we recognize the importance of biodiversity, and we cherish the hundreds of endangered species
that make their home in this state. We commend the court for moving this challenge onward and look forward to continuing our strong fight against these unlawful rules.” Judge Jon Tigar of the U.S. District Court for Northern California said states made a sufficient
case that they would be injured by the rule. The Department of Interior, which finalized the rule, did not respond to request for comment. The suit from the states argues the rollback violates a number of laws, including the Endangered Species Act itself,
as well as the Administrative Procedures Act, which lays out the rulemaking process, and the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires weighing a wide range of environmental factors before any big projects or rules. The Trump administration is also
facing a suit on its changes from a coalition of major environmental groups.”
[The Hill, 5/21/20]
https://bit.ly/2THkMHB
Justin McCarthy
Director, NEPA Campaign
The Partnership Project
1612 K St, NW
Washington, DC 20006 USA
C: (540) 312-3797
E: jmccarthy@partnershipproject.org
The Partnership Project, a registered 501 (c) (3) non-profit, is a collaborative effort of over 20 of the country’s most influential advocacy organizations, including Sierra Club, Earthjustice, League of Conservation Voters, and Natural
Resources Defense Council.