Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of Clean Water Protections | Hacker News Reader

Trump Prepares to Unveil a Vast Reworking of Clean Water Protections

nytimes.com

It is truly amazing how well these shitheads prey on our understandable frustration with the government to gather support, and redirect that energy into just creating more corruption to pad someone else's pocket.

Even if downsizing pressure is applied evenly across the board, soft targets like the EPA take the damage while any reform that would actually cut into someone's bottom line remains unaffected.

And the worst part is there will be countless cheerleaders who rationalize this action because the "other team" is upset.

Yup I'm deep into the reducing government waste camp but of ALL the things to focus on that hurt business they focus on the one thing that's a compromise for something better, not just straight up wasteful interference in markets. There are a hundred better things to spend time on.

There is an endless legacy of old agency mandates and legislation that started with good intentions to 'help the little guy' or whatnot that are a completely net negative for everyone (except a few politically connected companies).

The EPA is not even a 'soft target', there are plenty of low hanging fruit. It's just a very public and obvious economic intervention, so it gets plenty of attention. Meanwhile the million other things the government has their hands in goes unnoticed.

Politics is cancerous.

Vernal pools are an extremely important part of the ecosystem and also play a role in carbon sequestration.

The background of all of this begins with a farmer named Duarte who plowed a wetland on his property and ended up with a huge fine. It became a divisive issue; some cried government overreach, others said he should have listened to the army corps of engineers.

But there’s a reason we have an Environmental Protection Agency — people by-and-large aren’t going to go out of their way to protect these natural resources. There are exceptions, and I know conservation minded farmers — but if you look at the aggregate of farming in America, well, it’s pretty terrible for the environment.

Yes. There is a reason governments should be involved in this. Climate control, environment protection are classic game theory problem. Individual can profit from destroying a little bit of the environment but as a group we lose. Essentially governments do the group bargaining. Unless there is a group which represents all people government has to play that part.

Text of the Obama administration rule:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2015/06/29/2015-13...

And by “reworking” they mean “undermining”?

  “They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era,”

This is a flat lie, given that the Obama rule wasn't even put in place until the last 18% of his administration (barely 14 months before Trump's election).

Honestly curious: why does the timing make it untrue?

Because what they are rolling it back to is just the pre-August 2015 rule. In other words, the Obama administration was fine with the existing rule until most of the way through his second term, apparently doing it for just political chits for the 2016 election cycle.

That's a really confused way to look at policy.

It's not a reflection on policy so much as on media coverage of policy changes.

In the comment I replied to, you plainly try to invalidate a policy goal based on it being rolled out near an election, a thing that is pretty much always true (nationally significant elections occur every 2 years...).

On the other hand the context of this discussion is

> back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era

The comment you objected to was, in my reading, mainly noting that this was reverting to the policy in place nearly 2 full presidencies after said era.

  a thing that is pretty much always true

How many examples can you give from the Bush 43 administration? Or Bush 41? Or Reagan?

The practice of implementing major policy changes as a lame duck was pretty much nonexistent before 2000. It becomes an even bigger problem when rules are implemented that conflict with law, like the 2014 DACA expansion[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...

"Less than two years after inauguration" is a very bizarre definition of "lame duck".

It was 6.5 years after inauguration.

By this logic everything passed during the last year or two of Obama’s (and I guess any president’s) 2nd term is political chits?

Just because they didn’t pass the law for a few years doesn’t mean they didn’t care. There’s only so much any body of people can do at once.

The claim wasn't at it's core about Obama caring, it was about the false media framing this as a return to the bush era (between 10-18 years ago), when really its a change that happened in the Obama era (2-10 years ago).

That claim is fine. I was responding to this:

> In other words, the Obama administration was fine with the existing rule until most of the way through his second term, apparently doing it for just political chits for the 2016 election cycle.

I believe they use the Bush claim because Bush put in a provision in his act that no wetlands (acreage) would be lost. [I.e. Obama added to the protected wetlands but Trump is proposing to take some of those added by Obama back] Bush's provision would disallow clawing back. But that is definitely not the same as taking regulation (or protected wetland or clean water) to the state before Bush I was in office.

So, the article begins with that Bush claim but then references Obama implementations thereafter, so it does seem a bit disingenuous by them, but then, if they told it like it is, it would get people less agitated about it given it keeps some of the major provisions and isn't undoing regulation and setting it back to the way it was prior to Bush 1.

The Bush rule is that "wetlands will keep their federal protection"

The Obama rule is "farms near those wetlands cannot do bad thing to the wetlands"

By repealing the Obama rule, they are inherently repealing the Bush one.

Isn't the flaw with this that the two rules use a different definition for wetlands?

Sure, but that is not the same as the tacit claim "They’re definitely rolling things back to the pre-George H.W. Bush era".

Except that comment is likely referencing the regulatory environment, for which it is correct to state that the regulations are being rolled back to what they were before HW’s changes in this area.

No, you can't know that. The Trump rule, when it comes, doesn't have to correspond to any prior content.

Note that the Times never criticized the existing rule until after Obama changed it late in his tenure, giving him political cover.

This is what we get for putting so much power to interpret and enforce law in bureaucratic agencies.

So, we should empower corporations to do the right thing without oversight?

They have a name for that: public-private partnerships (PPP).

We should make the legislative branch exercise more direct control over the alphabet soup of administrative agencies.

I thought that was obvious but I guess not.

don’t get why you’re being downvoted. it legislation was passed then it would be much harder to revoke with the next president on a whim

That's what I assumed you meant too. I think you got collateral damage from anger toward diehard extreme libertarian capitalism.

I think their point was just that the legislation could be more explicit and leave less leeway in the hands of the executive branch...

Which of course is made difficult in a paralyzed, polarized legislative environment.

This is actually one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of cardinal voting systems such as approval voting. I believe that they'd elect a more diverse body of legislators, so that coalition building would become both necessary for political survival, and possible in the first place. Right now there's no true coalition building, just hyperpartisan compromise.

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