Another roller-coaster week in Washington began with President Donald Trump’s first state dinner, an elaborate affair with French President Emmanuel Macron, and finished with a less friendly visit from German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In between, Trump’s choice for secretary of state was confirmed, his pick to head the department of Veterans’ Affairs withdrew and his administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency attempted to save his job at two congressional hearings.

Beneath all that noise and commotion, Trump’s agencies continued to make major policy changes, imposing a new conservative agenda on everything from immigration to rental assistance. Despite the leadership distractions, EPA quietly made a couple of important moves on scientific research and energy from biomass. Here’s how Trump changed policy this week:

1. DHS ends special immigration status for 13,000 Nepalis

During the Trump administration, the immigration conversation has largely been dominated by the president’s travel ban and his attempt to end the Obama-era program for undocumented individuals brought here as children. But beneath those major initiatives, the Department of Homeland Security has quietly cracked down on an array of special immigration statuses.

This week, DHS added 13,000 Nepalis to the list of immigrants whose permission to live in the United States was revoked, which also includes tens of thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. The Nepalis were originally granted “temporary protected status” after a major earthquake struck Nepal in April 2015. TPS allows immigrants to stay and work in the United States until conditions have sufficiently improved in their home country. In its announcement on Thursday, DHS said Nepal is now safe enough for the 13,000 Nepalis to return, a finding rejected by immigration advocates and human rights groups who said the country is still recovering from the 2015 earthquake.

The Nepalis have until June 24, 2019, to leave the U.S.

2. HUD proposes overhaul of rental programs

Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, has long argued for social policies that promote work, using his own life story as evidence that low-income Americans don’t need federal handouts to succeed. In fact, he’s said, such handouts can be harmful for the poor.

On Wednesday, from his perch at HUD, Carson attempted to leave his mark on federal housing programs by proposing that low-income Americans pay more in rent. Under HUD’s current rental assistance programs, which support 4.7 million households, beneficiaries’ rental payments are capped at 30 percent of their income; subsidies cover the rest. Under Carson’s plan, that threshold would rise to 35 percent. The agency would also triple the cap on rent for the poorest families, raising it from $50 to $150 per month, and reduce how often the agency verifies tenants’ incomes from annually to every three years. That change is designed to give beneficiaries more time to continue working before losing some or all of their rental assistance.

HUD does not have authority to make the changes on its own—Congress must change the law—so Carson’s plan is unlikely to be implemented anytime soon. But the proposal represents the next step in the Trump administration’s effort to overhaul federal social policies and widen the use of work requirements.

3. EPA releases scientific transparency rule

For EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the week was dominated by his testimony at two congressional hearings, both on Thursday, that many in Washington believed would determine whether he would keep his job. But beneath those contentious hearings, Pruitt made an important policy change that could reverberate across the entire agency.

The new rule, released on Friday, doesn’t center on a specific policy but, rather, changes how the agency will use scientific studies in its rule-making. Under the new rule, the agency will no longer consider studies that don’t publish their raw data, which could significantly scale back the number of scientific studies used in agency rule-making. The change has long been pushed by conservatives who believe that scientists need to operate in a more transparent manner. At the congressional hearings this week, Republicans celebrated the move. Democrats and many scientists fiercely opposed the new rule, calling it a not-so-subtle attempt to undermine science and promote a conservative policy agenda.

4. Treasury extends compliance dates on Obama-era rule

In 2016, the Treasury Department imposed new record-keeping requirements on certain nonbank financial institutions. The new rule, created after the financial crisis by the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform law, was designed to make it easier for regulators to handle another crisis. But the institutions were critical of the rule and sought an exemption from certain pieces of it.

Treasury hasn’t quite sided with Wall Street yet—but it’s getting close. This week, the Treasury Department delayed the compliance dates for the rule to give the agency more time to consider requests for exemptions. The first compliance date, for institutions with more than $1 trillion in assets, was extended by roughly nine months, from June 23 until March 31, 2019. The compliance date for Institutions with smaller asset holdings, which are phased in over the next three years, were each extended six months.

The move is a win for the affected institutions and a defeat for bank reformers, who believe the record-keeping rules are important for managing the next financial crisis. It’s also the latest sign that the Trump administration is actively looking to loosen financial regulations.

5. EPA says burning wood is carbon neutral

For years, a debate has raged in the environmental world about the effects of wood-burning power plants, with industry groups arguing that trees are renewable and therefore such “biomass” energy is carbon neutral. Scientists cast doubt on those findings, arguing that burning wood produces more carbon emissions than newly planted trees can absorb.

On Monday, EPA sided with industry when it officially declared that biomass burned to produce energy is carbon-neutral. In a six-page document explaining the change, EPA specifically noted that the new policy is not a “scientific determination” but instead called its approach “pragmatic,” balancing competing priorities including environmental protection, economic growth and administrative uncertainty. The move is a victory for timber-heavy states like Georgia, which unsuccessfully lobbied for the new policy during the Obama administration, and a defeat for environmental groups, which slammed the change as another attempt by Pruitt to undermine environmental rules and ignore science.

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