Fisher-Price, the toy and baby toy company, and Boeing, the aerospace giant, do not have much in common, if it's not that people are putting their lives at the mercy of these manufacturers and the government is supposed to keep them safe.
Twice in recent months, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has not forced manufacturers of baby products involved in the death or injury of infants to recall their products.
The American Academy of Pediatrics wants a reminder of the Rock & # 39; n Play Sleeper seat from Fisher-Price. According to Consumer Reports, the commission issued an alert but did not impose a recall despite the 36 product-related deaths. The company states that it meets all "applicable safety standards".
And in the settlement of its administrative complaint against the company, the commission let Britax, the maker of the famous BOB Gear running stroller, issue a video of instructions instead of a recall despite hundreds of incidents of stall of the front wheel and dozens of wounded. children and adults. The settlement did not include admission by Britax, nor any determination by the board, that the strollers were defective or constituted a significant hazard, according to the commission.
It is no exaggeration to tie these regulatory decisions since the mantra of the Trump administration has been less government, a smaller government, and deregulation of sorts.
Trump did not directly participate in the FAA's review of the 737 Max 8 nor in the examination of strollers and sleepers by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but he set the tone for the government that He directs.
In Texas, on Wednesday, he signed decrees easing the energy regulations to give him exclusive power over the process of permitting cross-border pipelines and giving states less power. opportunities to slow down their projects for environmental reasons.
"Too often, special infrastructure, entrenched bureaucracies and radical activists hinder critical energy infrastructure," Trump said outside Houston, adding that it would make it easier for companies to build pipelines. oil and gas.
The movement has attracted immediate criticism.
"Especially at a time when the federal government has given up its responsibility to protect our environment and our public health, states like New York are on the front lines of protecting our drinking water and our public health," said the Democratic governor of New York. York, Andrew Cuomo, in a statement.
On Thursday, the Washington Post announced that the Trump government could apply new oversight to the regulatory power of independent agencies like the US Federal Reserve, which regulates banks; the Federal Electoral Commission; the Consumer Product Safety Commission; the Securities and Exchange Commission; and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
According to Public Citizen, a consumer rights group, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has seen a sharp drop in enforcement actions against companies, and 35 of them have been fined equally or over $ 5,000 during the first two years of the Trump administration, compared with 64 in the last two years of the Obama administration.
Attorneys General of the United States have come together to address some of the difficulties, including the arbitrary purpose of the President to repeal two regulations for each new and, more recently, his efforts to lower school nutrition standards.
There have been 71 multi-state lawsuits against the Trump administration, according to a tally written by a political science professor from Marquette. Many of them have to do with regulation or its lack.
Last week, The Washington Post announced that the Food Safety Inspection Service of the US Department of Agriculture was putting in place a plan to give hog producers a bigger role in terms of inspection, instead of veterinarians, finalizing the work shortly after the chief veterinarian of the inspection department, who had concerns. , left the agency. The USDA strongly contested Post's narrative in a statement, calling it a false report on a critical public health problem.
All of these things are connected in that they emphasize how the government touches the Americans – their food, their furniture, their transportation, their air – and that the government says the government is addressing them too much.
The Environmental Protection Agency, whose budget, proposed by Trump, aimed to reduce expenditures for fiscal year 2020 by 31 percent, was particularly active and made efforts to relax the rules for coal-fired power plants. that the courts have opposed some of the proposed regulatory reductions. The Environmental Integrity Group released a report in February after analyzing years of federal data and concluding that the EPA had conducted environmental violations inspections in 2018 at a level less than half that of George W. Bush and had opened fewer criminal prosecutions.
Democrats in the House said this week that they would use their new power in Congress to determine if EPA officials had broken the rules by pushing backward measures in favor of their former clients, according to the reports. information provided by Politico.
Trump has touted his efforts to reduce regulations and has challenged government agencies to cut their spending. He had stacks of paper higher than his 6-foot-3-inch frame printed to represent regulation at a memorable December 2017 event in which he used a pair of giant scissors to literally cut red tape.
He boasted that his first year in office had resulted in a significant reduction in regulation.
This does not mean that all regulations are good or that the United States has not had many. The presidents of both parties criticized the number of federal regulations. But the level of anti-regulatory zeal in the Trump administration has not been seen since the era of Ronald Reagan.
The Brookings Institution has a detailed follow-up that follows the proposed regulatory reductions, ranging from loosening some rules in meat packing plants, removing the proposed new rules for fracking operators, allowing new oil drilling off the US coasts, by easing the emission limits for new coal-fired power plants and by repeatedly delaying the rules obliging railway undertakings to put in place a new security system.
The reduction in regulation goes hand in hand with Trump's greater efforts to completely reduce the size of the government. It was clearly stated in a report that he could proceed with the dissolution of the Office of Personnel Management, which is essentially the federal government's human resources agency.
Taken individually, these actions and efforts can be lost, but taken together, they create a new vision of the government that the president and his administration realize.
And maybe more dangerous for Americans.
