Red Alert: Team Trump Unveils Anti-Planet, Anti-Worker Corporate Wish List

Amid swirling controversy over the burgeoning investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged Russia ties, groups are raising the alarm after the Trump administration on Thursday quietly unveiled its plan to roll back hundreds of Obama-era regulations aimed at shielding workers and the planet from corporate abuse.

“The only winners from this unified agenda are the corporate interests whose deregulatory wish lists the administration has adopted wholesale.”
—Amit Narang

The more than 800 planned and existing regulations the White House is set to scrap “govern everything—from the basics of everyday living, such as a product safety standard for mattresses’ flammability when it comes to cigarettes, to what sort of precautions construction firms should be required to take so their workers are not run over by other vehicles on site,” the Washington Post summarized.

Worker advocates and environmental groups were quick to characterize the administration’s deregulatory agenda as a sop to America’s largest companies at the expense of those Trump has repeatedly promised to protect.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), said in a statement. 

Trump’s deregulatory agenda “shows yet again that even though the president said he’d put working people first, his administration is acting to elevate corporate and financial industry interests, boosting corporate profits and enriching corporate insiders,” Owens concluded. “Working people are last, not first, as the president initially promised—an especially cruel irony during the administration’s so-called ‘Made in America Week.'”

In addition to slashing protections for workers and the environment, the Trump administration’s agenda also appears to kill an Obama-era effort to limit the pay of Wall Street executives.

“It wasn’t going to happen under President Trump,” Alexander Monterrubio, director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Federal Credit Unions trade group, told Reuters.

Robert Faturechi of ProPublica and Danielle Ivory of the New York Times reported earlier this month that the Trump administration has created “deregulation teams” assembled with the goal of “aggressively” tossing out federal regulations.