The unraveling of the Trump era

The Trump administration seems to have fundamentally underestimated the difficulty of changing U.S. government policy: As of April, out of the 259 regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda it issued that were challenged in court, 200, or 77 percent, were unsuccessful, according to a tracker from the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank at New York University that researches regulatory policy. A typical administration loses more like 30 percent of the time, the group says. (Though it is nonpartisan, the institute submitted critical comments and briefs on the Trump Department of Agriculture’s rules.)

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Part of the reason so many of Trump’s changes were short-lived is simply that he was a one-term president. It’s easier for your successor to reverse your policies if they have only a few years to set in. But that doesn’t explain the huge number of times his regulations were struck down by courts. Trump’s team fell short because it often made mistakes in the nitty-gritty work of rule-making, experts told me. That might come as a relief to Democrats, but it’s actually a warning: All it will take is someone with the same priorities as Trump, but better discipline, to reshape the way the government works.

The food-stamp saga highlights Trump’s rule-making foibles. The Department of Agriculture controls the food-stamp program, otherwise known as SNAP, which provides free food to 38 million mostly poor Americans. Almost as soon as Trump was elected, the department, led by former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, set about tightening eligibility for the program.

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