Biden administration officials are working on a plan to limit just how much damage former President Donald Trump and his loyalists could cause if he is re-elected back into the Oval Office with a fully Republican Congress to support him, according to a report.
Part of the plan involves hindering the ambitions of Trump’s longtime strategist Steve Bannon, who has long fostered dreams of destroying the administrative state — of tearing down the basic agencies that make government function.
While Trump didn’t manage to do this in his first term, one thing he did do was gut a lot of regulations enacted during the final days of the Barack Obama administration, via a procedure called the Congressional Review Act that lets regulations be permanently undone in a filibuster-proof congressional vote within a certain window of time.
This is easier than the longer process of ordering agencies to repeal regulations, which can be overturned in court if it’s not done properly and can be reversed by a future president.
Trump has pledged to do something similar with a second term. And Bannon, for his part, has vowed that “4,000 shock troops” will be ready to reshape the government in Trump’s image — an effort that could run in tandem with the antigovernment, Christian nationalist reforms dictated by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.”
But the Biden administration isn’t planning to just roll over and let this happen — and at the very least, they don’t want a repeat of the same thing that happened last time. According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden officials are working to ensure Trump will be able to repeal as few regulations as possible using the Congressional Review Act.
“The past few months have seen a frenzy of regulatory activity,” reported Andrew Restuccia. “In April, government agencies finalized nearly three dozen economically significant regulations, more than during any single month of Biden’s presidency, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center.
New policy announcements from the White House are being rolled out multiple times each week on issues ranging from tighter environmental rules to new restrictions on noncompete agreements.”
The idea behind this is that if these regulations are passed now, rather than in the lame-duck session, the clock will run out to use the Congressional Review Act on many of them. “Administration officials cast the effort as a precautionary measure and said it shouldn’t be viewed as an indication that the White House thinks Trump — who is neck and neck with Biden in many polls — will win the election,” the report noted.
