Trump cabinet sabotages its own policies

Buried within a recent judicial ruling overturning the Trump administration’s approval of the largely pointless Cadiz water project are a few clues to why Trump’s policymaking is so often blocked in federal court.

The operative term is “arbitrary and capricious.” Its appearance in a judge’s opinion in a Trump-related case signals that an administration effort to overturn an Obama-era rule or policy is too lazy, incompetent or slapdash to stand.

That’s the foundation of the June 21 ruling by U.S. District Judge George H. Wu of Los Angeles. Wu found that the Interior Department hadn’t done the necessary groundwork to reverse the Obama administration’s rejection of a project that would arguably damage the ecology of the Mojave Desert — or at least that the agency had made its decision first and conjured up a rationale later.

Wu wrote that in its legal analysis supporting its reversal, the Trump administration “seemingly cherry-picks portions of different sources to craft a case for a directed/desired result.”

Wu noted further that an Interior Department functionary had ordered his underlings to “get rid of the Hillary [sic] opinion” (in fact, Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with it), and to “look at the facts, and write an opinion suggesting that the facts … were ignored” when the previous administration blocked the project.

Put briefly, the administration often is so determined to reverse or sabotage an Obama policy that it bullheadedly assumes that all that’s needed is for it to say so. Federal agencies merely say they’ve come to a different conclusion from the Obama administration, and they think that’s enough.

The federal Administrative Procedure Act, however, requires more. If an agency desires to reverse a policy or regulation that was the product of painstaking groundwork and empirical data, it needs to build a commensurate factual record. Failing to do so, judges have ruled, exposes Trump’s actions to challenge under the law’s provision barring agency actions found to be “arbitrary, capricious [or] an abuse of discretion.”

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-arbitrary-20190705-story.html