President Joe Biden will undo another of Donald Trump’s actions by restoring portions of an environmental law that require climate implications to be addressed before federal agencies approve roads, pipelines, and other large projects.
According to The New York Times, the Biden administration intends to reinstate regulations of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act that were repealed by Trump.
Trump argued the law’s requirements slowed down the development of mines, road expansions and similar projects. Biden has undone many of Trump’s policies related to climate, including restoring the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement.
The Biden administration plans to toughen the requirements, adding a rule that requires an analysis of the greenhouse gases that could be emitted over the lifetime of a proposed project.
Regulators will also have examine the effect such projects will have on communities, particularly poor and minority neighborhoods, that have already faced disproportionate amounts of pollution.
The new rule comes ahead of Earth Day on Friday when Biden will be in Seattle to discuss wind and solar energy. It also comes after his administration announced last week it would resume issuing oil and gas leasing, which brought criticism from climate activists.
Officials told The Times the new rule would not have immediate impact since the Biden administration already weighs the climate change impacts of proposed projects.
But it would force future administrations to abide by the process or undertake a lengthy regulatory process and possibly legal challenges to again undo it.
Congressional action on climate is stalled after Biden’s Build Back Better package of social, education and climate initiatives died in the Senate.
It comes after Biden’s administration pushed to ensure the bridges, roads and other items that benefit from his $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill also support U.S. manufacturing.
New guidance issued Monday requires that the material purchased – whether it’s for a bridge, a highway, a water pipe or broadband internet – be produced in the U.S.
However, the rules also set up a process to waive those requirements in case there are not enough domestic producers or the material costs too much, with the goal of issuing fewer waivers over time as U.S. manufacturing capacity increases.
‘There are going to be additional opportunities for good jobs in the manufacturing sector,’ said Celeste Drake, director of Made in America at the White House Office of Management and Budget.
President Biden hopes to create more jobs, ease supply chain strains and reduce the reliance on China and other nations with interests that diverge from America’s.
With inflation at a 40-year high ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, he’s betting that more domestic production will ultimately reduce price pressures to blunt Republican attacks that his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package initially triggered higher prices.
‘From Day One, every action I´ve taken to rebuild our economy has been guided by one principle: Made in America,’ Biden said Thursday in Greensboro, North Carolina. ‘It takes a federal government that doesn´t just give lip service to buying American but actually takes action.’
Biden said that the roughly $700 billion the government devotes annually to procuring goods is supposed to prioritize U.S. suppliers but regulations going back to the 1930s have either been watered down or applied in ways that masked the use of foreign imports.
The administration could not say what percentage of construction material for existing infrastructure projects is U.S.-made, even though the federal government is already spending $350 billion on construction this year. The new guidelines would enable government officials to know how many dollars go to U.S. workers and factories.
Tucked into the bipartisan infrastructure package that became law last November was a requirement that starting on May 14 ‘none of the funds’ allocated to federal agencies for projects may be spent ‘unless all of the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used in the project are produced in the United States.’ That’s according to Monday’s 17-page guidance.
The guidance includes three standards for these requirements to be waived: if the purchase ‘would be inconsistent with the public interest’; if the needed materials aren’t produced ‘in sufficient and reasonably available quantities or of a satisfactory quality’; or if U.S. materials increase a project’s cost by more than 25%.
American manufacturers are about 170,000 jobs short of the 12.8 million factory jobs held in 2019, as manufacturing jobs began to decline before the pandemic began. But the U.S. has 6.9 million fewer manufacturing jobs compared with the 1979 peak, a loss caused by outsourcing and automation.
Getting more industrial jobs will likely mean adding more factories and assembly lines – as manufacturers are operating at a 78.7% capacity, which the Federal Reserve notes is above the historical average.