5 things

5 things Trump did this week while you weren't looking

As a busy year in Washington comes to an end, the Trump administration is just getting going.

By DANNY VINIK

A frenetic, noisy year in Washington came to an end this week as Republicans successfully passed their first major legislation of the term, an overhaul of the tax code. President Donald Trump cheered its passage, and Congress escaped town on Thursday after barely avoiding a government shutdown, ending the year on a rare quiet note.

With 2018 approaching, many of Trump’s senior White House aides are reportedly getting ready to pack up their desks. But elsewhere in his federal agencies, political officials are still just getting started: They’re reviewing Obama-era rules and actively implementing a new conservative agenda across the government. This week, quiet as it seemed, was no exception. From the withdrawal of new housing rules intended to better prepare for climate change to the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of a controversial herbicide, here’s how Trump’s administration changed policy this week:

1. HUD abandons Obama-era rules on floods

In October 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development took a major step to address the risks of climate change on the housing market with a new proposed rule that required that any building in a flood plain even partly financed by HUD to be built on higher ground. The rule was in response to an executive order from President Barack Obama requiring HUD to issue rules so that federally owned or managed buildings could better withstand severe storms.

But this week, HUD reversed course. It officially withdrew the Obama-era rule, citing Trump’s executive orders requiring agencies to review and repeal costly regulations. The news is a setback for environmentalists and a victory for homebuilding companies, which said the Obama-era rule would raise prices and hurt low-income homeowners and renters. HUD also withdrew four other proposed rules issued during the Obama era, including one on demolishing public buildings.

2. The trade war with Canada continues

During the first 11 months of Trump’s presidency, trade relations between the United States and Canada have been surprisingly hostile. The two sides have clashed over renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the U.S. has issued trade sanctions on Canadian lumber. And there are no signs that the relationship is going to improve.

One big flash point has been costly new duties levied against planes made by the Canadian aircraft-maker Bombardier, which Boeing has accused of unfairly benefiting from government subsidies in a $5.6 billion deal last year to sell regional jets to Delta. Since the Commerce Department proposed roughly 300 percent duties in September, Canadian and European leaders have spent the past few months heavily lobbying against them. This week, the agency announced its final figure: 292 percent, slightly reduced but still a giant amount.

Bombardier has a chance to derail the trade sanctions: The International Trade Commission, an independent agency, must rule in early 2018 whether its practices actually harmed any U.S. manufacturer. (If not, Commerce said, the duties would be terminated.) In the meantime, as trade negotiators enter a crucial part of the NAFTA renegotiations, trade relations between the U.S. and Canada are going in the wrong direction.

3. EPA says a controversial herbicide is not harmful to humans

For the past few years, a debate has been raging over Monsanto’s use of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Round-Up, the top-selling weed killer sprayed on millions of acres of crops across the globe every year. Environmentalists and consumer groups have argued that the ingredient is toxic and petitioned the European Union and the United States to ban it, which would deal the company a major financial blow. Monsanto has aggressively disputed those claims, arguing that there is no evidence that glyphosate is dangerous to humans.

This week, EPA came down clearly on Monsanto’s side. In a draft risk assessment, the agency said that glyphosate likely does not cause cancer and that there are "no other meaningful risks to human health when the product is used according to the pesticide label.” The finding contradicts a 2015 report from the World Health Organization, which found that glyphosate was a “probable carcinogen.” But more recently, the evidence has begun to swing in the company’s favor: Last month, a long-term study on glyphosate found no firm link between the herbicide and cancer, a finding that Monsanto has used to dispute the 2015 WHO report.

The EPA finding, which is just a draft and will now go through a 60-day comment period, means Monsanto is on something of a winning streak. Late last month, the EU voted to renew glyphosate’s license for five years, a major defeat for environmentalists who lobbied for a ban or strict limitations on use of the chemical. EPA will consider a similar renewal for glyphosate’s use in the U.S. in 2019. Its assessment this week spells good news for Monsanto when that review happens.

4. A (very) new era at Elizabeth Warren’s financial agency

After Richard Cordray stepped down as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog agency first proposed by Elizabeth Warren after the financial crisis, he set off a minor firestorm by attempting to install his deputy as acting director, hoping his Obama-era regulatory and enforcement priorities would survive a little longer. Trump went a very different direction: He installed the deregulatory hawk Mick Mulvaney, his White House budget chief, as acting director.

Mulvaney immediately paused all ongoing enforcement and regulatory actions. And on Thursday, the CFPB announced that it intends to reconsider pieces of its 2015 rule, mandated under Dodd-Frank, that requires mortgage lenders to submit data on their borrowers’ race, ethnicity, sex, income and age, as well as pricing and underwriting standards, an effort to crack down on discriminatory practices in the housing market. The CFPB also will stop penalizing mortgage lenders that submit inaccurate data, as long as the errors were not “material.”

The agency also said it intends to amend its 2016 rule on prepaid cards, which companies sometimes use instead of paychecks. The rule was intended to simplify a patchwork of state laws and protect consumers from fraud and abuse, including by mandating greater disclosures on overdraft limits. It was sharply criticized by financial firms as overly broad and difficult to implement. It’s unclear whether this action is a direct result of Mulvaney’s arrival; the CFPB had already found problems with its initial rule and delayed its implementation to next April. Either way, it’s clear that a new, conservative era has arrived at the CFPB.

5. EPA takes next step to rewrite the Clean Power Plan 

On October 16, 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that his agency was officially going to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era rules that imposed strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions. It was a decisive blow for perhaps Obama’s greatest effort to combat climate change and was cheered by conservatives and oil and gas companies who had slammed the Obama-era proposal. This week, Pruitt took the next step to rewrite the rule, issuing an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” to give the public a chance to comment on what a new rule should look like. In particular, the agency said that a new would rule likely focus on just coal-fired plants, not the broader power system.

The agency also left one big question unanswered: Whether it will attempt to challenge the Supreme Court ruling that required the agency to regulate greenhouse gases. Many conservatives have asked Pruitt to challenge that ruling, known as the endangerment finding, but many lawyers and industry experts believe such a challenge would be futile. In the regulatory document, the EPA walks through the endangerment finding but says “nothing” in the document “should be construed as addressing or modifying the prior findings.” Whether Pruitt intends to actually challenge the endangerment finding—or will slowly issue a new rule—remains unclear.