Bravo, Trump Administration for Increasing Transparency at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Breitbart News posted an article discussing the re-opening of a public online portal hosted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where Americans can access straightforward information about regulations so that they don’t run afoul of environmental rules unwittingly. This is a great move towards transparency by the EPA, and important that Breitbart helped spread the word so that business and land owners are aware. The massive body of environmental regulations that exist can be complex to navigate, and the EPA absolutely should provide an easy-to-understand guide, as it continues its worthwhile and justified deregulatory efforts.

In the post, “Exclusive: EPA Relaunches Guidance Document Database, Continuing Trump Tradition of Transparency,” Breitbart received exclusive comments from EPA deputy administrator David Fotouhi regarding the new “Guidance Portal.”

The goal of the portal, Fotouhi told Breitbart, was to “compile all of those in one searchable, publicly accessible database, so that if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a farmer or rancher, if you’re in any way subject to one of our regulatory requirements or statutory obligations, you can go on there and conduct a search and see very clearly what the agency’s interpretation of that requirement and how it applies to your situation.”

The portal will include guidance documents intended to outline the steps a business or landowner is should follow to best ensure they don’t run afoul of regulatory requirements. Feedback on the portal will also help the agency figure out places they can make EPA guidance simpler, getting rid of redundancies and bloat, Fotouhi told Breitbart. Additionally, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the portal should help small business owners navigate the Clean Air or Water Acts without needing to hire “a high-priced lawyer.”

This is something that seems very common sense: regulations people can understand. It was a program that the previous Trump administration attempted to implement by executive order, but strangely the Biden administration rescinded it as part of their own environmental agenda. Biden’s EPA was unable to hide the portals completely without an official rulemaking, so they simply failed to keep them updated. This was just one more example of the lack of transparency embraced by the Biden administration as it expanded the reach of its environmental agenda.

Government environmental regulations have long crushed small business and landowners. The Clean Water Act, for example, was at the center of a 16-year legal battle that fortunately concluded in the favor of a family trying to build a home on property they owned in Sackett v. EPA. The family had begun to construct a house on a small lot in Idaho, when the EPA suddenly decided that their property contained wetlands that counted as “navigable waters,” and thus needed to replace the soil already moved. In reality, the Sackett property was merely near a ditch that only intermittently filled with water which fed to a creek. The Supreme Court finally determined the EPA was out of line, ending the so-called “significant nexus” standard for the Clean Water Act. Damage had already been done to other landowners and farmers who were not able to fight it out in court so long, while the EPA’s standards were not at all transparent, confusing, and often arbitrary.

Making any of this kind of permitting process easier to understand should be a no-brainer. It’s very good that the Trump administration is pursuing transparency in regulatory agencies again, it can only benefit Americans, and Breitbart News’ writers are to be applauded for recognizing how important these issues are, and publicizing the Trump administration’s efforts to improve government transparency.

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