Week-in-Review: US Becomes Minerals Exploration Deregulation Nation

by Jeff Yoders on FEBRUARY 17, 2017

This week President Donald Trump began to deliver on his campaign promises to deregulate industry and unshackle American manufacturing, using the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that empowers Congress to review, by means of an expedited legislative process, new federal regulations issued by government agencies and, by passage of a joint resolution, to overrule the regulation.

First up, Congress passed a law under the CRA that rolled back an Obama administration rule that would have required oil, gas and mineral extraction companies to disclose payments made to governments. The Securities and Exchange Commission rule never went into effect and exploration companies and industry organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute, said it put natural resource companies at a competitive disadvantage to foreign firms by disclosing too much of their contract terms.

Metals producers and other companies dependent on minerals to make their products generally supported the repeal. Another potent input for the creation of metals is coal and Trump followed up the CRA action by signing a bill that quashed the Office of Surface Mining’s Stream Protection Rule, a regulation to protect waterways from coal mining waste that officials finalized in December. Regulators spent most of Obama’s administration eight years writing the Stream Protection Rule and it was effectively wiped away with the stroke of Trump’s pen thanks to the CRA.

The House has passed several CRA resolutions, and the Senate has so far sent three of them to President Trump so far, but there are at least 10 CRA bills still moving through the House and Senate. Until now, only one CRA resolution had ever been passed and signed into law: the Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s workplace ergonomics rules, in 2001.

If Trump and the republican Congress continue to use the CRA to roll back rules, they could potently erase much of the regulation that business organizations have said hamstrung them for the last eight years.

Using the CRA to roll back regulations would certainly make it easier for Trump to deliver on his promises of smarter, better regulations for industries such as manufacturing and mining. Using it also helps the Congress keep up a commitment from an early Trump executive order that it must repeal two regulations for every new one. We could see a slew of deregulation actions to allow Congress to “bank” new regulations if it needs to pass a law to, perhaps, create a new definition of what a countervailable subsidy is for companies to petition the Commerce Department to allow it to place duties on foreign imports.