In the News

Regulatory rollbacks across the entire executive branch have put more Americans at risk for the coronavirus, according to a new report from New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity. "This administration's problematic policies have increased our collective susceptibility to COVID-19, and the consequences are getting more dire by the day," said Jason Schwartz, who authored the report, called "Weakening Our Defenses: How the Trump Administration's Deregulatory Push Has Exacerbated the COVID-19 Pandemic."

While experts recommend distancing on airplanes as much as possible—urging high-risk individuals to be especially cautious—many airlines have nonetheless eschewed basic measures to ensure social distancing, and rightfully received widespread condemnation. But a battle-tested mechanism to protect safety for airline passengers already exists and could be applied immediately to reduce passenger capacity—if only the Trump administration were willing to do it.

The Trump administration’s relentless push to gut dozens of environmental and public health safeguards worsened the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, a new report from New York University School of Law found. The lengthy analysis, which NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity published Tuesday, comes as President Donald Trump and his team act as if the coronavirus threat is waning ― when the U.S. outbreak stands out as one of the worst in the world ― and as they work to finalize a frenzy of environmental rollbacks ahead of November’s election. “The administration’s problematic policies have increased our collective susceptibility to Covid-19, and the consequences are getting more dire by the day,” Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and author of the report, said in a statement.

“I think all of this will come back to haunt Trump,” says Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “By making very aggressive use of tools to dismantle the policies of the prior administration, Trump has made it easier for the next administration to do the same. Once the norms are broken, it's easier for the next administration to follow what looks like the new normal.”

Recent groundbreaking legal and business decisions mark a turning point for longstanding advocacy against pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. And while they don’t represent any sort of change of heart in the federal government, they can be understood as examples of the laws we already had on the books working—and working particularly well in the face of incompetence. They also serve as a harbinger of future costly outcomes, especially when agencies and project proponents cut corners rather than fully analyze environmental effects and engage the public in decision making.

Richard L. Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, said events described in the memo amounted to “uncharted waters” and reflected a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s actions toward inspectors general at other agencies. “The inspectors general are part of a system of ensuring that agencies operate within the law,” Mr. Revesz said. “Every citizen should actually care about that.”

Bethany Davis Noll, who directs NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity, noted that “Republican-appointed judges are finding against the administration at a similar rate to the Democratic judges.” And these losses at the hands of Republican appointees run the gamut, from immigration to environment to health care. Both the census and DACA cases “went against the administration even though the Supreme Court is majority Republican,” Noll said.

The rulings showed that in key instances Trump's administration has been unable to craft high-profile policies that will stand up in court. The administration has lost 79 out of 85 cases involving federal agencies on deregulatory or policy issues tracked by the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank connected to New York University School of Law.

A mysterious group has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to kill net metering. FERC should say no – not because net metering should last forever, but because states, not the feds, have the tools needed to reform it.

Even if interest groups battle rollbacks in court, federal officials could just stop enforcing some regulations, said New York University School of Law professor Richard Revesz. “Agencies have a fair amount of discretion of when to bring enforcement actions,” he said.