White House orders 'immediate regulatory freeze' Rules on pipeline safety, overtime pay, oil trains and endangered bees could feel the sting of President Donald Trump's initial attack on Obama administration rules.

President Donald Trump took his first steps Friday night toward what he has promised will be a wide-ranging assault on Barack Obama’s regulatory agenda, a crusade eventually aimed at erasing Obamacare and landmark climate change regulations.

Trump’s initial action — ordering a freeze on all pending regulations until his administration can review them — would have a more modest impact: It could throttle almost-completed rules aimed at expanding overtime pay, tightening pipeline safety, protecting imperiled bumblebees and imposing stricter safeguards on rail shipments of flammable crude oil, among other topics.


Symbolically, the move marks the start of a dramatic shift in regulatory policy under Trump — even if Obama's agencies made certain to push their most ambitious regulations to completion long before his term ended. Trump would need Congress’ help to unwind Obama’s most sweeping and contentious rules, such as those on climate change, but Republican lawmakers are already eagerly pushing in that direction.

Susan Dudley, a former administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, noted that such regulatory freezes by new presidencies are common. Obama had ordered a similar halt in January 2009 for pending regulations from the George W. Bush administration.

“Since outgoing presidents expect it, there probably aren’t a lot of major regulations it would apply to," said Dudley, who’s now director of the George Washington University Regulatory Study Center.

According to federal records, a few dozen Obama administration regulations from agencies like the Transportation Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and Agriculture Department haven’t yet been completed. Those could be vulnerable to being frozen by the Trump administration’s order, which came out just hours after the new president was sworn in.

At least one rule affected by the order may be a victim of bad luck in court: A regulation expanding the number of lower-income workers who are guaranteed overtime pay had been set to take effect in December, but a federal judge in Texas put it on hold. Because the rule is not yet in effect, Friday’s freeze would apply.

Anticipating a regulatory freeze, Obama took pains to finish as many regulations as possible long before he left office. But his agencies continued to pump out regulations late last year in hopes that they could take effect under Hillary Clinton. Even after Trump’s upset victory in November, some agencies were notably aggressive in pumping out regulations in the past few weeks, hoping they could slip through in the fog of the transition.

Then-EPA administrator Gina McCarthy told her staff after the election that the agency was “running — not walking — through the finish line of President Obama's presidency.”

But Friday’s order from the Trump White House told all executive branch departments and agencies: Halt.

In a memo, chief of staff Reince Priebus said the freeze was designed to ensure that Trump's appointees "have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations."

For regulations that have been finished but have not taken effect, the order calls for temporarily postponing their effective date for 60 days — or possibly longer. The memo also calls for the immediate withdrawal of regulations that agencies have sent to the Office of the Federal Register but haven’t yet been published. The request allows exceptions for emergency situations relating to health, safety, financial or national security.

Trump has made it clear he plans a much wider attack on his predecessor’s regulations. His immediately relaunched White House website takes numerous swipes at Obama-era rules, including those on oil, gas and coal.

“For too long, we’ve been held back by burdensome regulations on our energy industry,” the White House page on energy policy says, specifically citing Obama’s initiatives on climate change and a wide-ranging rule meant to protect wetlands and waterways. It echoed predictions from an industry-funded think tank contending that eliminating the rules would “[increase] wages by more than $30 billion over the next seven years.”

The memo sent out Friday night won’t affect rules that have already taken effect. But regulations that took effect after last May would still be vulnerable to a different kind of attack, under a seldom-used 1996 law that allows Congress to repeal recently enacted rules using simple-majority votes. Republican lawmakers are already taking steps to use that law to repeal possibly dozens of late-Obama-administration regulations.

It would be even more complicated and time-consuming for Trump’s agencies to repeal older regulations, such as the EPA’s 2015 regulation on greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, a bulwark of Obama’s climate agenda. And in some cases, Congress would need to repeal or alter the underlying law, such as the Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street regulations or the Affordable Care Act that created Obamacare.

Still, Friday’s order could halt action on a number of unfinished rules. Those could include one EPA is drafting on greenhouse gas pollution from aircraft, as well as a court-ordered rule requiring hardrock miners to be able to pay for their environmental clean-ups.

The freeze would also apply to a final rule from the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration directing operators of oil and gas pipelines to more promptly report leaks and take other steps that Congress ordered in a 2011 safety law. The Obama administration released that final rule Thursday, but it was not scheduled to appear in the Federal Register until Monday.

PHMSA also recently proposed a rule to tighten restrictions on shipments of crude oil by rail — an area where the oil industry said it could manage itself. That proposal also would be put on hold in response to Priebus' memo.

And the freeze will affect the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to put a bumblebee on the endangered species list, which does not formally take effect until next month. The agency said the once-common rusty patch bumblebee’s population has fallen 87 percent since the late 1990s, but farm groups have said a federal listing is unnecessary.

Other rules halted or delayed by the action include:

— A rule that would allow foreign startup founders to remain in the U.S. temporarily.

The rule would grant temporary “parole status” to foreign entrepreneurs who plan to launch or expand startups in the U.S. To qualify, foreign investors must show that the startup has “substantial potential for rapid growth and job creation,” which they could satisfy with steps such as obtaining $100,000 in government awards or grants.

— A proposed rule that would toughen the visa requirements for immigrants who promise to invest in job-creating projects in the U.S.

Under current rules, so-called EB-5 visas are available to immigrants who invest $1 million in a commercial project that will create or preserve at least 10 jobs in the U.S. If the applicants choose to invest in a high-unemployment area, the amount is reduced to $500,000.

Under the proposed rule, the standard investment threshold would rise to $1.8 million. In high unemployment areas, it would be $1.35 million.

Several high-ranking Republicans backed the rule and expressed a desire to see it go into effect.

— A rule issued Jan. 9 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that is meant to lower the amount of beryllium that workers can be exposed to. The rule was supposed to go into effect March 10.

— A handful of energy-efficiency standards on their way out the door at the Energy Department.

The agency sent new regulations for portable air-conditioners, commercial boilers, walk-in coolers and freezers, and power supplies — rules DOE estimated would collectively save consumers at least $4.5 billion over 30 years — that had yet to be published in the Federal Register on Inauguration Day. Meanwhile, new standards for pool pumps, ceiling fans, residential air conditioners and heat pumps, totaling at least $18 billion in potential saving, were published before Friday but don’t take effect until later in the year.

Some of the DOE efficiency rules, such as those for pool pumps and residential air conditioners, are likely to get back on track because they were negotiated with industry. However, commercial boilers and ceiling fans could face extra scrutiny under the Trump administration.

Alex Guillen, Darius Dixon, Marianne LeVine, Ted Hesson and Cogan Schneier contributed to this report.