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It's money talking from WNYC.. I'm Charlie Herman. Congress is barely back in session, and already the president has made a deal to address several pending issues. Its just he did it with democrats instead of his own party. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.
This is a really positive step forward. It will work to quickly provide aid to those hurt by Harvey. It will avoid default and it will fund the government to fund a shutdown
Until this deal, the White House, and congress, had been criticised for not accomplishing much. But Trump has been busy, at least when it comes to reversing the actions of previous presidents, especially President Obama. Catherine Rampell is with the Washington Post and has been following what's been getting undone at the White House. Good morning Catherine.
Good morning.
Okay the president this week said that he is bringing to an end the "dreamers act" or DACA, and that's been getting a lot of analysis, but many of the actions that he's been taking haven't gotten that level of scrutiny. For example, cancelling a rule that dealt with pay at companies. What was that and why did it matter?
The previous president, president Obama had determined that, in addition to reporting information about the breakdown of employees by race, ethnicity and gender, which large companies have been required to do actually for many decades to the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they would additionally have to provide information about compensation. The idea behind this was that you would have more pay transparency, the data would be anonymised of course, so you wouldn't be able to connect a salary to a specific person, but this way you could see, or the EEOC at least could see whether there were systemic differences in pay by gender or race. So this was an additional requirement for large companies that was supposed to go into effect early next year, and President Trump has determined that actually that's not going to happen.
So, when this decision was announced, it was a little surprising that Ivanka Trump actually supported it.
Yes absolutely, Ivanka Trump has basically built her brand on gender equity, on helping working women; she spoke at the RNC convention about the importance of closing the gender pay gap, and it seemed like this particular action from the administration would go against everything she has said, and that she would be upset by it, but instead, she, you know, released this statement giving her blessing to this action.
Well another Obama-era rule that the president ended had to do with government funded infrastructure projects in flood areas, and clearly thats going to be an issue now for the rebuilding after the damage from hurricane harvey, and we have Irma coming. This is what the president said about that rule:
"This over-regulated permitting process is a massive, self-inflicted wound on our country."
How would this have worked this uh, executive order, and where do things stand now when we consider rebuilding?
The point of the regulation which was an Obama-era regulation was to basically say that if taxpayers are going to help fund complex infrastructure projects there needs to be higher standards to make sure that those infrastructure projects can withstand flooding, and flooding projections that would be affected by climate change, so that we should update basically all of these standards to make sure that we're investing our money properly. The private sector had complained about this, ah the National Association of Homebuilders had said that this would make it more costly to build houses for low and moderate people etcetera, of course president Trump is himself a builder and is sympathetic to this argument. By undoing this rule that just means it's more costly on the backend. Rather than spending the money on frontend to make sure that these infrastructure projects can deal with catastrophic events, we're paying for it in terms of building costs.
So, that announcement from Trump about the regulation that overshadowed it in a lot of ways, because he made it at the same event at Trump tower where he talked about Charlottesville and talked about how there was violence on both sides, is one of the reasons why we are not hearing a lot about the executive orders that he's issuing, is that they're getting overshadowed by all the news that's happening, that's coming out of this administration?
Absolutely. There are just so many um, more bombastic, shinier, uh, news stories that are happening left and right, whether it's about Russia, whether it's about some of those Neo-Nazis being defined people - all of those things are just attracting outsized attention and as a result, these very meaningful regulatory changes that are happening are flying under the radar. And the other reason I would argue that these regulatory changes are not getting all that much attention is that they're complicated. A lot of the time people don't know the basis to begin with. This EEOC rule, I can guarantee you that the vast majority of Americas had no idea that there was this effort to require big companies to provide information about the gender and racial wage, yea. And this infrastructure rule - the same deal. This is not a key part of most people's lives, they're not paying attention to it because they don't need to. That's what government is for. Government is supposed to be figuring out what works in a public's interest. So they don't have the bandwidth, basically to pay attention to this technical, complicated rules, this minutia.
But these decisions to rescind a lot of these orders or cancel some, I mean, they could have real impact on people's lives.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, you think about this EEOC rule, it does affect people's wages. If it turns out that a company is repeatedly paying women or African American workers less than their male or white counterparts, and the EEOC could step in and correct that, that affects people's standard of living. Same deal with these infrastructure projects. Not only does this mean taxpayers are on the hook for, uh, huge amounts of money if infrastructure projects, you know, highway systems or whatever, can't withstand a major, catastrophic, natural disaster, it also means that the people who live there might be without roads, might be without bridges, might be without infrastructure that they actually rely on day to day so it seems like these kinds of rules are abstract, they're technical, they don't really matter for people's pocketbooks in their daily lives but they absolutely do.
Often one of the arguments that is made for ending these executive orders is that they're job killers and that they hurt the economy, so how do we know when that's the case, or when these are just businesses that just don't want the regulations.
There are always going to be costs to any new regulation that is introduced and the party that bears those costs is going to be very vocal about them and claim that this is bad for the economy on net. We actually do have a rigorous cost-benefit analysis that already takes place when a new, one of these new regulations and rules is introduced, and that is a matter of public record and can be looked up. And of course, you can talk to economists, you can look at white papers from various, uh, think tanks to try to determine if YOU think the costs outweigh the benefits.
When you look at the actions that Trump has taken to rescind previous executive orders and regulations, do you see a theme?
I think the theme is "Undo everything that the previous guy did."
That simple?
Yeah, and, er, regardless of whether its a good idea or bad idea.
Catherine Rampell is an opinion writer for the Washington Post. Catherine, as always, thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Charlie Herman, and this is "Money Talking" from WNYC.
