‘The Greatest Day of Deregulation Our Nation Has Seen’

Lee Zeldin, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that the agency’s new mission is to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”

Good Morning!

Here are today’s highlights:

• Alan Pentz says there are better ways to learn how to run a business than getting an MBA.

• A growing number of corporate refugees have decided they’d rather own a business than climb the corporate ladder.

• John Arensmeyer says the Continuing Resolution would be a blow to small businesses.

• Eliminating taxes on tips and overtime is very popular but would create lots of complications.

REGULATION

The EPA wants to change its mission: “In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. But beyond that, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reframed the purpose of the EPA. In a two-minute-and-18-second video posted to X, Mr. Zeldin boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission is to ‘lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.’”

• “The EPA has ‘no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment,’ the first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, said as he explained its mission to the country weeks after the EPA was created by President Richard M. Nixon. He said the agency would be focused on research, standards, and enforcement in five areas: air pollution, water pollution, waste disposal, radiation, and pesticides.”

• “Mr. Zeldin said the EPA would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the ‘good neighbor rule’ that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.”

• “In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said. In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as ‘the holy grail of the climate-change religion.’”

• “The announcements do not carry the force of law. In almost every case, the EPA would have to undergo a lengthy process of public comment and develop environmental and economic justifications for the change.” READ MORE