This Is Guaranteed To Upset The Left!

Trump signs repeal of transparency rule for oil companies

BY TIMOTHY CAMA - 02/14/17 02:37 PM EST 435

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President Trump signed legislation Tuesday to repeal a controversial regulation that would have required energy companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.

The legislation is the first time in 16 years that the Congressional Review Act (CRA) has been used to repeal a regulation, and only the second time in the two decades that act has been law. It is the third piece of legislation Trump has signed since taking office three weeks ago.

It is the start of one front in an aggressive deregulatory effort that the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are undertaking to roll back Obama-era rules on fossil fuel companies, financial institutions and other businesses that they say have suffered for the last eight years.

The resolution repeals a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule written under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

It was meant to fight corruption in resource-rich countries by mandating that companies on United States stock exchanges disclose the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments.

At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump said the legislation is part of a larger regulatory rollback that he and congressional Republicans are undertaking with the goal of economic and job recovery.

“This is a big signing, very important signing,” Trump said, flanked at his desk by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and other lawmakers.

 

“We’re bringing back jobs big league. We're bringing them back at the plant level, we're bringing them back at the mine level. The energy jobs are coming back,” he continued. “A lot of people going back to work now.”

 

Trump then asked Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), the measure’s lead sponsor, to speak about it and regulatory reform in general.

 

“Over 20 years, there’s been 56,000 rules that have been put in place, with very little legislative input or oversight, and it’s time that changed,” he said.

The administration and congressional allies say the SEC rule imposes massive, unnecessary costs on United States oil, natural gas and mining companies, putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage to foreign companies that do not have to comply.

“Misguided federal regulations such as the SEC rule addressed by H.J.R. 41 inflict real cost on the American people and put our businesses, especially small businesses, at a significant disadvantage,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said earlier Tuesday.

“It’s a priority for the Trump administration to fix our broken regulatory system so that it enhances American productivity and well-being without imposing unnecessary costs and burdens,” he said.

“Signing this joint resolution is one more step toward achieving this goal.”

The House passed the repeal measure earlier this month, followed shortly by the Senate.

Democrats and supporters of the SEC rule see the rollback as a victory for corruption.

“The rule they’re trying to repeal protects U.S. citizens and investors from having millions of their dollars vanished into the pockets of corrupt foreign oligarchs,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said earlier this month. “This kind of transparency is essential to combating waste, fraud, corruption and mismanagement.”

Supports argued in part that if the United States takes a leading role on foreign payment transparency, other major nations would follow.

Exxon Mobil Corp., whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now secretary of State, was one of the most vocal opponents of the rule, along with other major oil companies.

The SEC is still obligated under the Dodd-Frank law to write some form of a transparency rule for extractive industries.But under the CRA, the agency can never publish any rule that is “substantially the same” as the one that has now been overturned.

Both chambers of Congress have also passed a CRA resolution to overturn the Interior Department’s stream protection rule for coal mining, and Trump supports the repeal.

The House has passed numerous other regulatory repeal measures under the CRA, including ones on methane pollution and gun ownership, and the Senate is likely to take up at least some of them.

Will Trump Make The Necessary Slashes In Regulations? We Sure Do Hope So

Report Reveals $42 Billion in Regulations Trump Could Slash on Day 1

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Throughout much of his successful campaign for the presidency, President-elect Donald Trump spoke repeatedly about his intentions to roll back, if not entirely undo, many of the business-killing federal regulations put in place by President Barack Obama’s administration.

To that end, the American Action Forum dug into the regulatory nightmare emanating out of Washington, D.C., and compiled a list of dozens of regulations that could be immediately cut by Trump and the Republican-led Congress, according to The Daily Caller.

Utilizing what is known as the Congressional Review Act to invalidate at least 48 major regulations, the AAF report noted that, “Together, those rules impose more than $42.5 billion in total costs, $6.5 billion in annualized costs, and 53 million paperwork burden hours.”

“Republicans have the opportunity to enact regulatory reform on a scale not witnessed since President Reagan,” the report continued. “CRA disapproval resolutions seem poised to be a significant part of those plans.”

Analysts and report authors Sam Batkins and Dan Goldbeck provided a few examples of cuts that could immediately be made, such as to the Department of Interior’s restrictions on oil drilling in the Arctic region, or the Environmental Protection Agency‘s ludicrous fuel efficiency standards for the trucking industry.

The Arctic drilling rule has been estimated to cost more than $2 billion, while the EPA’s industry-killing fuel regulation costs soared to an astonishing $29.3 billion.

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“Although it is unlikely that Congress will cash in all its political capital to this end, several high-profile major rules – and their sizable burdens – could go by the wayside in 2017,” the report noted, tempering expectations for a broad sweep of all burdensome regulations right away.

Furthermore, there are other regulations that may not have even been written yet that could be quickly overturned, due to various agencies in the Obama administration rushing to push through new “midnight” regulations at the last moment.

Alas, Obama’s regulators have been quite busy this year, already formulating more than 78,000 pages of new rules thus far in 2016, with an estimated cost of at least $148 billion. The administration sill has a month and a half still remaining to write more.

Nevertheless, we anxiously await Trump and his team to finally taking office and beginning the arduous process of taking a scythe to the field of chaff that has grown up in and around D.C.’s regulatory structure.

Please share this on Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know that Trump and Congress can get to work immediately cutting back some of Obama’s many new federal regulations.

What do you think of this report noting that Trump and Congress can undo billions of dollars worth of burdensome regulations right away?