Donald Trump says he wants to make these changes on Day 1 – Deseret News

If you want to see Utah Governor Spencer Cox really mad, talk to him about how hard it is to build things in America.

The US is stuck, he argues, because there is nothing we can do. At a Democratic Dialogue discussion at the University of Virginia this week, Cox jumped out of his chair when the discussion turned to the difficulty of getting projects off the ground in the US.

Democrats need to learn something from Donald Trump's re-election, he said.

He recounted his experience working on the approval of a new transmission line as a county commissioner in 2008, then finally saw the line approved last year in 2023.

“That's crazy. This just doesn't happen in Europe, folks. It doesn't happen. You can talk about environmental policy in Europe and hold them up as the gold standard and they approve stuff in a year,” he said.

President-elect Trump seems to agree with Cox. Cutting red tape for projects and increasing energy production were the main themes of his first term and he made it the focus of the 2024 run-up as well, giving his rhetoric a quality.

It is not just about increasing energy production and building more houses, he said RallyIt will “bring back the American dream.” “The American dream is dead,” he claimed, because of how expensive life has become in recent years.

But while Trump rolled back regulations — cutting “red tape” — during his first term in office, he relied on executive orders that President Joe Biden quickly reversed when he took office in 2021. If Trump wants to make more lasting changes, he needs to work with Congress on regulatory reform.

With the Supreme Court overturning the “Chevron doctrine,” which gave deference to federal agencies' interpretations of laws passed by Congress, court-watchers expect a flood of cases that could undo years of agency rulemaking.

That gives Trump and the Republican-led House and Senate a chance to make permanent changes to the legislative language that guides environmental and other regulations. But Senate Republicans must work with their Democratic counterparts to pass the necessary 60-vote threshold in the upper chamber.

Trump: A 'dictator' on day one

Trump said when he broke the news late last year Fox News Town Hall He's not going to be a dictator, “except on day one. I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” This caused confusion, but Trump made it clear several times that what he meant was that he wanted to quickly implement a number of policies related to energy production and immigration.

On his first day in office on January 20, 2025, Trump said he wanted to reverse Biden's executive orders that made permitting and energy production more difficult. But that's likely to be his mandate — like reversing that of the Environmental Protection Agency rule Pushing US car production toward electric vehicles – will end up in court.

In 2020, in the waning months of his first term in office, Trump issued an executive order to speed up the permitting process for infrastructure projects. It directed several federal departments, including the Interior, Agriculture, Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers, to fast-track the project. They specifically targeted the permitting process required under the “National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Water Act.” National Association of Countieswho wrote about it at the time.

But then on Biden's first day in office in 2021, he reversed several of Trump's executive orders, specifically targeting actions that softened Trump's environmental regulations. Biden too cancelled license for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil from Canada to the US, and asked agencies to review and recommend executive orders on environmental issues for review.

Trump says he wants to revive the Keystone XL project Politico.

It was this regulatory whiplash that caused Utah Sen. Lawmakers like Mike Lee want Congress to regain control over who is in charge of establishing new rules. He proposed REINS Actwhich would require congressional approval of any regulation with an impact on the economy of more than $100 million.

Trump is a builder. Can he shake things up again?

Ezra Klein, cont Opinion piece in The New York TimesAddresses some of the issues on the political right and the left honestly — including frustration among many in the nation's bluest cities about sclerotic government.

“I worry about the inability to build affordable and quick housing, build trains, provide services, allow clean energy, fund science without getting buried in bureaucracy and process,” he writes. “I worry about how absent the Biden administration's huge accomplishments — the Inflation Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — are in people's lives. In part because the way government works and spends and distributes under Democrats is so slow.

At least in theory, Trump should be able to reverse this decline. He spent his adult life running the Trump Organization, primarily a real estate development and management company. He is familiar with the regulatory hurdles that stand in the way of growth.

But Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Politico in 2020 that he didn't think Trump was as successful on regulatory reform as he had hoped during his first term.

“All ambient air quality standards are in place: ozone, (particulate matter), lead, (carbon monoxide), (sulfur dioxide) and so on,” he said. “Lead is not allowed as an additive in gasoline. Industrial facilities are still required to have water quality permits. Land disposal of hazardous waste is prohibited. Toxic substances are still regulated. And on and on.”

Part of what slowed Trump down was the lawsuits. said then-senior adviser to the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund Politico His group won 73 of the 81 lawsuits against the Trump administration, and many more are pending.

While environmental groups worry about Trump's second term, they say they are better prepared this time than in 2016. Jonathan Pershing, a former special envoy for climate under the Obama administration, said he had done “a lot of planning, a lot of scenario work, a lot of thinking about how to think about how this happened the last time.” Weather news.

Stuck in court can delay projects for years. One of Biden's signature statement victories, a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, has yet to produce the promised building boom. Rules and requirements for the projects are on the way, the government executive Reported.

But while Trump's actions to cut regulations and taxes may help the construction industry, his plans to add tariffs on foreign goods and limit immigration could hurt them, according to the trade publication. Construction briefing.

Utah, West at the forefront of energy expansion

If Trump is able to implement his plans to expand infrastructure and boost US energy production, Utah and other western states will benefit.

Cox, along with most members of Utah's congressional delegation, including Sen.-elect John Curtis, have pushed for the federal government to roll back the rules or give more control to the states.

After being elected to the Senate earlier this month, Curtis visited the Deseret News offices where he talked about how Utah wants to “lead the nation” and how the U.S. should “lead the world” in energy production. To do that, the US needs to allow transmission capacity and improvements, he said.

Utah is one of the states at the forefront of the new wave of nuclear power generation, and the state hopes to benefit from the fossil fuel industry as well. State lawmakers and industry leaders are ready, and Cox says he hopes things will change under Trump.

“It only takes five to six years to get approval to do things that are good for the environment in the name of environmental protection,” he said at UVA. “We've become incredibly stupid over the last decade, and I hope, if nothing else, that we'll break through and find great ways to come together.”