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regulations
'This Executive Order is Illegal': Trump Attacks Half-Century of Environmental Protections in One Fell Swoop
"This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court," said one advocate.
Apr 11, 2025
Numerous environmental protection groups were preparing to file lawsuits Friday after President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to repeal what he called "unlawful regulations" aimed at protecting the public from pollution, oil spills, and other harms—sharply curtailing the process through which rules are changed as he ordered agencies to "sunset" major regulations.
The order was issued a week-and-a-half before the deadline set by another presidential action in February, when Trump required agencies to identify "unconstitutional" and "unlawful" regulations for elimination or modification within 60 days.
Those restrictions, under Wednesday evening's order, can be repealed without being subject to a typical notice-and-comment period.
Trump named the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement among several agencies affected by the order, and listed more than two dozen laws containing regulations that must incorporate a sunset provision for no later than September 30, 2025.
The laws include the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987, and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, suggested the order was Trump's latest push to benefit corporate polluters.
The Trump corporate regime orders agencies to ‘sunset’ environmental protections, as part of an effort to make it easier for industry to pollute. thehill.com/policy/energ...
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— Hans Kristensen (@nukestrat.bsky.social) April 11, 2025 at 7:14 AM
Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was "beyond delusional" for Trump to attempt to repeal "every environmental safeguard enacted over the past 50 years with an executive order."
"Trump's farcical directive aims to kill measures that protect endangered whales, prevent oil spills, and reduce the risk of a nuclear accident," said Hartl. "This chaotic administration is obviously desperate to smash through every environmental guardrail that protects people or preserves wildlife, but steps like this will be laughed out of court."
In a memo, the White House wrote that "in effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the 'good cause' exception in the Administrative Procedure Act."
"That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be 'impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,'" said the White House.
As climate advocates scoffed at the suggestion that regulating nuclear power and pollution-causing energy infrastructure is "contrary to the public interest," legal experts questioned the legality of Trump's order.
"If this action were upheld, it would be a significant change to the way regulation is typically done, which is through notice and comment," Roger Nober, director of George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center, toldGovernment Executive. "If the agencies determine that a rule is contrary to the Supreme Court's current jurisprudence, then [this order says they] have good cause to remove it and [they] can get around notice and comment. That's certainly an untested and untried way of implementing the Administrative Procedure Act."
Georgetown University law professor William Buzbee toldThe Hill that the Supreme Court "has repeatedly reaffirmed that agencies seeking to change a policy set forth in a regulation have to go through a new notice-and-comment proceeding for each regulation, offer 'good reasons' for the change, and address changing facts and reliance interests developed in light of the earlier regulation."
"Adding a sunset provision without going through a full notice-and-comment proceedings for each regulation to be newly subject to a sunset provision seems intended to skirt the vetting and public accountability required by consistency doctrine," he said. "Like many other attempted regulatory shortcuts of the first and second Trump administration, this [executive order] seems likely to prompt legally vulnerable agency actions."
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert suggested that the executive order is the latest example of Trump's push to govern the U.S. as "a king."
"He cannot simply roll back regulations that protect the public without going through the legally required process," Gilbert told Government Executive. "We will challenge this blatantly unlawful deregulatory effort at every step to ensure it doesn't hurt workers, consumers, and families."
Michael Wall, chief litigation officer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the order "a blatant attempt to blow away hundreds of protections for the public and nature, giving polluters permission to ignore whatever is coming out of their smokestacks while developers disregard endangered species protections and Big Oil no longer heeds the reforms put in place after the Deepwater Horizon disaster."
"This executive order is illegal," he said. "Congress passed these laws, and the president's constitutional duty is to carry out those statutes; he has zero power to rewrite them."
"There's no magic wand the administration might wave to sweep away multiple rules on a White House whim," Wall added. "Any changes to the rules the president wants rescinded would have to be justified, rule by rule, with facts, evidence, and analysis specific to that rule. He cannot do this by fiat."
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Amazon Rebuked for 'Reckless' Lawsuit Against Product Safety Agency
"Amazon wants to eliminate the Consumer Product Safety Commission so it can sell dangerous, poisonous, and defective crap with no consequences," said one critic.
Mar 21, 2025
Consumer advocates this week denounced a lawsuit filed by e-commerce giant Amazon against the federal agency tasked with promoting product safety and alerting the public to risks, a move that comes amid the Trump administration's war on government regulators.
Amazon's lawsuit, filed earlier this month in a Maryland federal court, claims that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is unconstitutional. The Seattle-based company—which raked in $638 billion in 2024 revenue—says it should not be held legally responsible for products sold on its site by third-party vendors.
"Amazon is suffering, and will continue to suffer, irreparable harm from being subjected to an order issued by an unconstitutionally structured agency," the company's complaint states.
"Let's be real: Amazon would gleefully sell products that could kill your kids for a 5-cent profit."
Last July, the five CPSC commissioners unanimously determined that Amazon is "a 'distributor' of products that are defective or fail to meet federal consumer product safety standards, and therefore bears legal responsibility for their recall" under the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA). More than 400,000 products were subject to the CPSC order, including "faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hairdryers without electrocution protection, and children's sleepwear that violated federal flammability standards."
In January, the CPSC issued a decision and order outlining steps Amazon must take "to notify purchasers and the public about hazardous products for which the commission determined Amazon was a distributor under the CPSA."
Critics allege that by suing the CPSC, Amazon is attempting to avoid responsibility for shipping dangerous products to its hundreds of millions of customers.
"Instead of demonstrating its commitment to consumer safety, Amazon has fought the CPSC every step of the way for more than three years, and now it's going to court," Consumer Reports director of safety advocacy William Wallace said this week. "The law is clear that Amazon is a 'distributor' in this case and must carry out a recall."
Amazon just sued @cpsc.gov bc it wants to be held blameless for the safety of third-party-sold products on its platform. That's bad enough. It's also claiming the CPSC's structure is unconstitutional—attacking the foundation on which all its work rests. advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_releas...
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— William Wallace (@wwconsumer.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 6:47 AM
Wallace continued:
Amazon wants to be held blameless for the safety of products sold by third parties on its platform, which is bad enough—but what's even worse is that the company is attacking the legal foundation on which the CPSC rests. Amazon's suit suggests the company thinks the people of the United States would be better off without an independent, bipartisan safety agency to enforce our laws and protect consumers from dangerous products. We strongly disagree and condemn Amazon's reckless constitutional claims.
"It's absurd to suggest that because a company hosts a marketplace online it should be exempt from sensible requirements that help get hazardous products out of people's homes and prevent them from being sold," Wallace added. "The court should reject Amazon's arguments. Taking Amazon at its word would mean hazardous products slipping through the cracks, even when they are capable of injuring or killing people."
Wallace's remarks came a day after the CPSC issued warnings for products including a toddler playset due to what the agency says is a risk of serious injury or suffocation death, a mattress posing a fire risk, and a brand of liquid Benadryl whose packaging is not child-resistant.
Amazon and SpaceX—owned by Elon Musk, the de facto head of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency—have also spearheaded lawsuits claiming the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency tasked with protecting workers' rights, is unconstitutional.
The companies and their billionaire leaders have found an ally in U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration has signaled that it will not defend the precedent set by Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court ruling protecting commissioners at independent federal agencies from being fired by the president at will, if it is challenged in court.
Amazon wants to eliminate the Consumer Product Safety Commission so it can sell dangerous, poisonous and defective crap with no consequences. Let's be real: Amazon would gleefully sell products that could kill your kids for a 5 cent profit. Pure evil.
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— Emma Lydon (@emmalydon.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 9:18 AM
Georgetown University Law Center professor Victoria Nourse toldThe Washington Post this week that right-wing lawyers are emboldened by the administration's stance, describing lawsuits like those filed by Amazon and SpaceX as "little fires being lit all over Washington."
"What Trump wants and what the companies want is to get rid of all this regulation, period," Nourse added.
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'Godfather of AI' Demands Strict Regulations to Stop Technology From Wiping Out Humanity
"The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation."
Dec 28, 2024
Warning that the pace of development of artificial intelligence is "much faster" than he anticipated and is taking place in the absence of far-reaching regulations, the computer scientist often called the "Godfather of AI" on Friday said he believes chances are growing that AI could wipe out humanity.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's "Today" program, Geoffrey Hinton said there is a "10% to 20%" chance AI could lead to human extinction in the next three decades.
Previously Hinton had said he saw a 10% chance of that happening.
"We've never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before," Hinton explained. "And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples. There's a mother and baby. Evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother, but that's about the only example I know of."
Hinton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics this year for his research into machine learning and AI, left his job at Google last year, saying he wanted to be able to speak out more about the dangers of unregulated AI.
"Just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely."
He has warned that AI chatbots could be used by authoritarian leaders to manipulate the public, and said last year that "the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have."
On Friday, Hinton said he is particularly worried that "the invisible hand" of the market will not keep humans safe from a technology that surpasses their intelligence, and called for strict regulations of AI.
"Just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not going to be sufficient to make sure they develop it safely," said Hinton.
More than 120 bills have been proposed in the U.S. Congress to regulate AI robocalls, the technology's role in national security, and other issues, while the Biden administration has taken some action to rein in AI development.
An executive order calling for "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence" said that "harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks." President-elect Donald Trump is expected to rescind the order.
The White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights calls for safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, data privacy, notice and explanation when AI is used, and the ability to opt out of automated systems.
But the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act was a deemed a "failure" by rights advocates this year, after industry lobbying helped ensure the law included numerous loopholes and exemptions for law enforcement and migration authorities.
"The only thing that can force those big companies to do more research on safety," said Hinton on Friday, "is government regulation."
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