July 20 marks six months into President Trump’s second term. Unleashing the fossil fuel and nuclear industries, and terminating the Green New Scam were major planks of his campaign. So what are his first semester grades for setting policy and policy implementation? Awesome with a few concerns.
For setting policy, the President gets an A-plus. He has issued numerous Executive orders to promote domestic fossil fuel and nuclear energy and to roll back the Green New Scam, the climate hoax, “environmental justice” and other pointless overregulation, including:
- Unleashing American Energy; Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements
- Declaring a National Energy Emergency
- Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential
- Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects
- Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis;
- Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing
- Protecting American Energy from State Overreach
- Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry
- Nuclear Energy Renaissance
- Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable Energy Sources.
President Trump also rescinded numerous Biden-issued Executive orders on energy and the environment.
President Trump’s cabinet departments, notably the Department of Interior and Environmental Protection Agency, have also announced policies and undertaken rulemakings to implement these Executive orders. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been re-focused on weather instead of climate. EPA’s entire scientific research arm, the infamous Office of Research and Development (ORD), has been entirely eliminated. When I started fighting junk science in 1990, I started by fighting ORD. Now, it’s gone and I’m still standing.
The Biden administration took an “all of government” approach to advancing the climate agenda. President Trump has ended that. The Department of Defense, for example, “does not do climate change crap,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Department of Homeland Security has deported its work on climate.
This and more is all fantastic work and a dream come true for America and for policy geeks like myself who have worked for decades on these issues and never imagined that any President would ever have the knowledge and courage to issue these directives.
President Trump also gets an A-plus for first semester implementation. His EPA goaded Congress into using the Congressional Review Act to terminate California’s mandate for electric vehicles, a state action would have been a de facto national mandate.
Under the President’s leadership, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that included cutting the trillion-dollar climate spending of the Inflation Reduction Act (aka, the “Green New Scam”) in half. This is unheard of. I cannot recall any Republican Congress being able to cut any climate spending at all, let alone $500 billion worth of it.
More remarkable still, the OBBBA also zero-ed out our 50-year-old fuel economy standards. Although the standards weren’t eliminated, they were set to zero, meaning that car manufacturers will no longer be fined for not meeting them. Also, subsidies for EVs will be ending on September 30th of this year.
All this accomplishment in six months is amazing if not miraculous work. Yet there are some areas that bear watching.
It is not enough for President Trump to issue directives and hope or imagine they are being carried out. He needs to make sure his directives are actually completed and completed correctly so that they withstand judicial scrutiny and cannot be easily undone by a future administration. I know this from personal experience being a part of President Trump’s EPA transition team in 2016-2017. Many of the deregulatory policies of the first term took too long to do and were easily reversed by the Biden administration and/or a federal court.
One example that particularly sticks in my craw is the failure of the Trump EPA 1.0 to reverse the death sentence issued to the re-built (glider) truck industry by the Obama EPA. President Trump ordered both Trump EPA administrators to reverse the Obama rules, but both Trump EPA chiefs were thwarted by EPA resistance. To this day, the ultra-MAGA glider truck industry remains pointlessly moribund.
Another looming problem is insider influencers. In President Trump’s first term, insiders talked him out of permitting the Pebble copper mine in Alaska because it might affect some hunting and fishing areas. Yet a couple weeks ago, President Trump put tariffs on copper to boost the US industry. Hunters and fishermen forced the removal from the OBBBA of a Trump-favored provision for the federal government to sell millions of acres of unused federal lands.
Finally, although President Trump wants to unleash the American energy industry, a popular musician persuaded him to block the Tennessee Valley Authority from building a new natural gas plant in Tennessee on a NIMBY basis. Sorry, but we need the energy. These plants must go somewhere and not every community has a connected influencer to lobby the White House.
In summary, President Trump’s policies have been great. The implementation has been nothing short of awesome. Let’s just make sure that the latter stays that way.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
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