Cracks in the regulatory freezeout

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On the first afternoon of his second term, President Donald Trump signed 46 executive orders. They included welcome tools for restraining the administrative state. Among many others, President Trump issued the following orders to executive agencies and departments:
(1) Do not propose or issue any rule in any manner, including by sending a rule to the Office of the Federal Register (the “OFR”), until a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President after noon on January 20, 2025, reviews and approves the rule…
(2) Immediately withdraw any rules that have been sent to the OFR but not published in the Federal Register, so that they can be reviewed and approved as described in paragraph 1, subject to the exceptions described in paragraph 1.
Despite those orders, at least seventeen rules were sent to the OFR before Mr. Trump became president and published after he became president. Fifteen were published in the OFR yesterday and two today. CEI previously commented on one of them when it was proposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) in the Biden administration. It is entitled Energy Conservation Standards for Commercial Refrigerators, Freezers, and Refrigerator-Freezers.
CEI’s comment discussed the problems with DOE’s existing methodology for estimating the social cost of carbon (SCC) and how the proposed change would make things worse. The SCC is an estimate, in dollars, of the cumulative social damage from an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted in a specific year. Conversely, it is an estimate of the social benefits of avoiding or reducing one ton of CO2 emissions in that year.
From 2010 to 2021, the government’s Interagency Working Group (IWG) on the Social Cost of Carbon (later renamed the IWG on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases) published four SCC reports, all relying on the same basic methodology. Then in November 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published “updated” SCC estimates based on a new methodology. The EPA’s estimates were more than three times larger than the IWG’s estimates. For example, in the IWG’s central estimate for 2050, one ton of CO2 causes $85 in climate damage. In the EPA’s update, the same ton causes $310 in climate damage. CEI’s comment spotlighted major problems with the EPA’s methodology.
The methodology DOE proposed to adopt was not science, nor was it even good science fiction. CEI’s comment was cited eight times in the final rule, and DOE did decide not to replace the IWG’s SCC estimates with the EPA’s but to publish both sets of estimates and defer a decision on which methodology is better. It’s all junk science. Neither should be used to inform regulatory decisions or benefit-cost analysis.
Allowing this rule to sail through is at odds with the President Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, Unleashing American Energy, which pointed out the need to “safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances” and announced an immediate review of all such appliance regulations.
The autonomous operation of the federal government that adopted a regulation of the previous administration contrary to the orders and policies of the present administration illustrates how out of control the federal bureaucracy really is. This rule should be withdrawn. It is, any event, a good candidate for a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act.