Energy

Trump Says 70% Of Federal Regs ‘Can Go’

REUTERS/David Becker

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Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said as much as 70 percent of federal regulations “can go” because they are just strangling the economy.

“We are cutting the regulation at a tremendous clip. I would say 70 percent of regulations can go,” Trump said at a campaign event in New Hampshire. “It’s just stopping businesses from growing.”

Trump’s remarks came just hours after campaign advisor Anthony Scaramucci told Reuters Trump would get rid of just 10 percent of regulations. Another Trump advisor later confirmed to Reuters a 10 percent cut was part of his regulatory plan.

Scaramucci listed some of the reforms Trump would put in place, which mostly consisted of eliminating regulations on financial markets. But Trump has said in the past we would go as far as eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“I’m not cutting services, but I’m cutting spending,” Trump told Fox News’ Chris Wallace in 2015.

“But I may cut Department of Education,” Trump says. “I believe Common Core is a very bad thing.”

“Environmental Protection [Agency], what they do is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations,” Trump said.

“We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses,” he said.

The Republican Party platform for 2016 also calls for getting rid of the EPA and turning it into an “independent bipartisan commission.”

“We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science,” reads the GOP platform.

“Over the last eight years, the Administration has triggered an avalanche of regulation that wreaks havoc across our economy and yields minimal environmental benefits,” the GOP platform reads.

EPA has been aggressively moving to push out global warming regulations before President Barack Obama leaves office in 2017.

A report by the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute found federal regulations cost the U.S. economy more than $1.8 trillion every year — that’s $15,000 per household.

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