If you want to see Utah Gov. Spencer Cox get really mad, talk to him about how hard it is to build things in America.
The U.S. is stalled, he argues, because we can’t get anything done. At a Democracy Dialogues discussion at the University of Virginia this week, Cox just about jumped out of his chair when the discussion turned to the difficulty of getting projects off the ground in the U.S.
Democrats need to learn something from the reelection of Donald Trump, he said.
He recounted his experience of working on approval for a new transmission line in 2008 as a county commissioner, then finally seeing the line approved last year, in 2023.
“That is insane. That does not happen in Europe, folks. It does not. You can talk about environmental policy in Europe and hold them up as the gold standard, and they approve stuff in a year,” he said.
President-elect Trump appears to agree with Cox. Cutting red tape for projects and increasing energy production was a central theme of his first term in office, and he made it a focus of his 2024 run as well, kicking his rhetoric up a notch.
Not only is it important to increase energy production and build more housing, he said at his rallies, it will “bring back the American dream.” “The American dream is dead,” he claimed, because of how expensive life has gotten in recent years.
But while Trump did roll back regulations — cutting “red tape” — during his first term in office, he relied on executive orders that were quickly reversed by President Joe Biden when he took office in 2021. If Trump wants to make more lasting change when it comes to regulatory reform, he’ll have to work with Congress.
With the Supreme Court overturning the “Chevron doctrine,” which gave deference to federal agencies’ interpretation of legislation passed by Congress, court-watchers are expecting a flood of lawsuits that could undo years of agency rule-making.
This also gives Trump and the Republican-led House and Senate an opening to make permanent changes to legislative language guiding environmental and other regulations. But Senate Republicans will still need to work with their Democratic counterparts to pass the 60-vote threshold needed in the upper chamber.
Trump: A ‘dictator’ on day one
Trump made news late last year when he said during a Fox News town hall he would not be a dictator, except for on “day one. I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill.” It caused an uproar, but Trump clarified several times that what he meant was he wanted to swiftly enact several policies related to energy production and immigration.
On his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump says he wants to reverse Biden’s executive orders that made permitting and energy production more difficult. But it’s likely his orders — like reversing the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule pushing U.S. car production toward electric vehicles — will end up in court.
In 2020, in the waning months of his first term in office, Trump issued an executive order to speed up the permitting process for infrastructure projects. It directed several federal departments, including Interior, Agriculture, Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers, to fast-track projects. He specifically targeted permitting processes required under “the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act,” according to the National Association of Counties, which wrote about it at the time.
But then on Biden’s first day in office in 2021, he reversed many of Trump’s executive orders, specifically targeting Trump’s actions softening environmental regulations. Biden also revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil from Canada to the U.S., and told agencies to review and suggest executive orders on environmental issues for reversal.
Trump says he wants to revive the Keystone XL project, according to Politico.
This regulatory whiplash is why lawmakers like Utah Sen. Mike Lee want Congress to take back control when it comes to who is in charge of instituting new regulations. He’s proposed the REINS Act, which would require congressional approval of any regulation that has more than a $100 million impact on the economy.
Trump is a builder. Can he get things moving again?
Ezra Klein, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, takes an honest look at some of the problems on the political right and left — including the frustration among many in the country’s bluest cities over sclerotic government.
“I’m worried about the inability to affordably and quickly build homes, build trains, deliver services, permit clean energy, fund science without burying it in bureaucracy and process,” he writes. “I’m worried about how absent the huge accomplishments of the Biden administration — the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — how absent they are in people’s lives. In part because the way government works and spends and delivers under Democrats is very slow.”
In theory at least, Trump should be able to reverse this decline. He’s spent his adult life running The Trump Organization, primarily a real estate development and management company. He’s familiar with the regulatory roadblocks that stand in the way of growth.
But Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, told Politico in 2020 he didn’t think Trump was as successful at regulatory reform as he’d hoped to be in his first term.
“All the ambient air quality standards remain: ozone, (particulate matter), lead, (carbon monoxide), (sulfur dioxide) and so forth,” he said. “Lead is not allowed as an additive in gasoline. Industrial facilities must still have water quality permits. Land disposal of hazardous wastes remains prohibited. Toxic substances are still regulated. And on and on.”
Part of what slowed Trump were lawsuits. A then-senior adviser for the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund told Politico his group won 73 out of 81 cases against the Trump administration, and had several more cases pending.
While environmental groups are concerned about a second Trump term, they say they’re better prepared this time than they were in 2016. Jonathan Pershing, the former special envoy for climate under the Obama administration, said they have done “a great deal of planning, a great deal of scenario work, a great deal of thinking on how to reflect on the last time this happened,” according to Climate News.
Getting tied up in court can slow projects for years. One of Biden’s signature legislative wins, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, has yet to produce the building boom that was promised. The rules and requirements for projects got in the way, Government Executive reported.
But while Trump’s actions to cut regulations and taxes could help the construction industry, his plan to add tariffs to foreign goods and limit immigration could hurt them, according to the trade publication Construction Briefing.
Utah, the West at forefront of energy expansion
If Trump is able to enact his plans to expand infrastructure and boost the production of U.S. energy, Utah and other Western states are set to benefit.
Cox, along with most members of Utah’s congressional delegation, including Sen.-elect John Curtis, have pushed the federal government to roll back regulations, or to give states more control.
After his election to the Senate earlier this month, Curtis visited the Deseret News offices where he spoke about how he wants Utah to “lead the nation,” and for the U.S. to “lead the world” in energy production. To do that, the U.S. will need to tackle transmission capabilities and permitting reform, he said.
Utah is one of the states on the forefront of a new wave of nuclear power generation, and the state also hopes to see gains in the fossil fuel industry. State lawmakers and industry leaders are ready, and Cox says he has some hope things will change under Trump.
“It takes five or six years just to get approval to do the things that are going to make the environment better in the name of protecting the environment,” he said, at UVA. “We’ve become incredibly stupid over the past decade, and I’m hoping, if nothing else, that we’ll break that and figure out big ways to come together.”