Washington was jolted from its August recess this week after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly, President Donald Trump stoked racial tension by blaming “both sides” for the violence—and then combative top aide Steve Bannon was pushed out on Friday.

Rumors swirled that other White House officials were on the verge of resigning, but there’s a reason why those aides, in the White House and agencies, have yet to pull the cord: They’re still achieving conservative reforms, despite the distractions coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This week, big policy changes came from the Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s how Trump changed policy in America this week:

1. DHS ends parole program for Central American children

In November 2014, Vice President Joe Biden announced that the Obama administration was taking steps to stem that summer’s border crisis, in which tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooded into the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The State Department set up a program to allow the children of parents who are lawfully present in the U.S. to seek refugee or parole status while still in their home countries—without actually making the dangerous journey to the United States. The goal was to reduce the flow of unaccompanied children without leaving them in danger.

On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security immediately ended the parole component of that program; DHS canceled the approvals of 2,700 kids who had been conditionally approved for parole but had not received final signoff. The program was small—about 1,400 kids had been paroled and entered the United States—but had still angered immigration hawks who said it was too generous to the children.

The announcement follows Trump’s executive order in February in which he directed the three main immigration agencies to use parole “sparingly.” It will please immigration hawks who have long criticized the way officials use parole, but it also carries some risk: The number of unaccompanied minors dropped by almost half in fiscal 2015, and ticked up again last year. The exact reasons for the drop are unknown, but the parole program may have been part of the reason. (The children are still eligible to apply for refugee status without crossing into the U.S., but that bar is higher.) Trump’s repeal of the program could persuade them to head north without U.S. approval, illegally crossing the border.

2. The end of an Obama health care payment experiment

While most of the attention on Obamacare has focused on the individual insurance market and the Medicaid expansion, the law also tests numerous ideas to lower the spiraling cost of health care. One approach is known as “bundled payments,” which institutes a fixed price for certain medical procedures, like hip surgery or knee replacement. If the hospital could perform the procedure for a lower cost, it kept the difference. If not, it lost money.

The Obama administration had begun testing the concept of bundled payments through a few different programs—with mandatory participation by hospitals that take Medicare money. The mandated participation always irked Tom Price, the former congressman and current secretary of Health and Human Services, and this week, he significantly scaled back those programs. Hospitals will no longer be required to participate in a bundled payment program for certain joint replacements in many markets. Two yet-to-launch bundled care programs—an expansion of the existing joint replacements program and a new program for heart attacks and cardiac surgeries—were canceled altogether.

The rollback isn’t a repudiation of “value-based-care,” the movement to pay doctors for quality over quantity, which has bipartisan support. But it does scale back one of the goals of the Affordable Care Act, which was keeping costs under control, and signals that Price, a former physician, will be less aggressive in forcing the new payment system on hospitals, a victory for doctors who are critical of the new payment plans and a defeat for health officials seeking a rapid transition.

3. EPA’s regulatory rollback continues

No agency has been more aggressive than the Environmental Protection Agency in undoing Obama-era regulations and the August recess has not slowed down the agency. This week, EPA said it would reconsider two more rules, one on the toxic discharges from coal plants and another on emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks.

On Monday, in a court filing, Pruitt said EPA would conduct a rule-making to “potentially revise” a 2015 rule from the Obama administration that set limits on the dumping of toxic metals, like mercury, from coal-fired power plants. The news wasn’t a surprise, since Pruitt issued a rule earlier this spring delaying the compliance dates of the Obama-era rule. Then, on Thursday, EPA announced that it would review certain parts of the agency’s 2016 rule that set emissions standards on heavy trucks for model years 2021-27. It was seen as one of Obama’s last big pushes for cleaner air, as the Obama-era EPA attempted to lock down as many climate rules as possible, before a climate-skeptic administration took over.

4. The end of “Operation Choke Point”

In 2013, the Department of Justice announced a new initiative to cut off certain predatory lenders and online merchants from the banking system by cracking down on banks and payment processors. The idea was to pressure banks, as potential facilitators of potential financial crimes, to cease doing business with those companies. The program, officially called Operation Choke Point, was heavily criticized by Republicans who said DOJ was targeting legal businesses that the Obama administration just happened to dislike, like payday lenders and gun retailers, without any evidence of wrongdoing.

This week, in a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, DOJ said it would end Operation Choke Point, which it called a “misguided initiative.” The move is a victory for Republicans and industries like payday lenders who felt targeted by the program.

5. A flurry of small trade deals

In the trade world, all eyes were on Washington where American, Canadian and Mexican officials converged for the first session on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the Trump administration also made a series of small trade announcements this week to coincide with Vice President Mike Pence’s trip through four South American countries.

In Colombia, Pence announced that the Colombian government would lift restrictions on a certain type of U.S. rice exports, while the U.S. will now allow the import of Colombian avocados. In Argentina, Pence inked a deal to allow the export of U.S. pork products for the first time since 1992, opening up a potential $10 million per year pork market to U.S. producers. Finally, the Department of Agriculture announced that South Korea was lifting its ban on U.S. poultry and egg products, which was imposed in March after a series of bird flu cases in the United States.

All these deals are dwarfed by top issues under discussion as part of the NAFTA renegotiation. But they continue to show that career officials can make progress on sticky trade issues, willing to compromise with foreign nations despite Trump’s at-times bellicose trade rhetoric.

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