Did President Trump Have a Conflict of Interest about Infrastructure?

Last updated on: April 20, 2022 at 10:04 am by Kermit Zarley

Did President Trump Have a Conflict of Interest about Infrastructure? 2022-04-20T10:04:16-07:00 Kermit Zarley

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Republican Donald Trump first campaigned as U.S. president, in 2015-2016, with a platform which asserted that as a non-politician and businessman, he would shake up things in Washington that would result in a better economy, among other things.

In 2020, one way in which President Trump attempted to do that was to nullify certain environmental laws having to do with infrastructure under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) passed by Congress in 1970, legislation which was signed into law by Republican President Nixon. The Washington Post explains today that this law had “required the government to assess the environmental consequences of federal actions, such as approving the construction of oil and gas pipelines” in which their environmental impact was seriously considered and thus prohibited from endangering.

In 2020, President Trump overturned this fifty-year old, congressional legislation and bypassed Congress by exercised executive privilege in abolishing environmental laws and regulations. Some of them were imposed on the basis of the scientifically-proposed, human-induced global warming which Trump and his voters rejected. It allowed construction projects, such as the building of pipelines and roads, to be exempted from environmental review and thus be built “in a small fraction of time.”

Drew Caputo of Earthjustice had explained at the time concerning these Trump changes affecting NEPA, “The whole idea of the law is to give better information in advance to decision-makers and the public. It appears that these [Trump] changes are an effort to undermine both of those purposes of the statute. It would basically make the federal government become an ostrich.”

President Trump had been a major contractor of skyscrapers in New York City about all of his adult life, and contractors are well known for opposing environmental laws. Therefore, in Trump’s efforts as president to abolish environmental laws that hindered the construction industry, did he not have former contractor he had a conflict of interest? I think so. What do you think?

Today, the White House announced that it has restored provisions of NEPA with a new rule. Representative Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, said of it, “I’m glad this administration recognizes how egregiously wrong those [Trump] actions were and is moving forward to restore the protections that have helped protect our environment while promoting sustainable development for decades.”

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National Environmental Policy Act

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