Romney’s Goals on Environmental Regulation Would Face Difficult Path

By JOHN M. BRODER, NYT

WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney vowed in a campaign appearance earlier this year to “take a weed whacker” to the thicket of federal regulations adopted by the Obama administration and promised to impose a rigid freeze and cost cap on all new government rules.

He has pledged to reverse a half-dozen major Environmental Protection Agency pollution and public health rules, to swiftly approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, to rewrite the ambitious new vehicle fuel efficiency standards and to open untouched coastal and wilderness areas to oil and gas exploration. Mr. Romney envisions a nation in which coal-burning power plants are given new life, oil derricks sprout on public lands and waters, industry is given a greater say in the writing and enforcement of environmental rules and the Code of Federal Regulations shrinks rather than grows.

But as President Obama learned in his first years in office as he tried to undo some of his predecessor’s industry-friendly energy and environmental policies, such promises are easier to make than keep. They require the rewriting of decades-old laws, the assent of a balky Congress, favorable rulings from courts and a bureaucracy that works smoothly and swiftly to advance a president’s goals. That is a steep hill in today’s Washington.

Cutting the regulatory state down to size has been a mainstay of Republican campaign oratory for years, and the basis of an avalanche of bills passed over the past 18 months by the conservative House Republican majority, all of which have died in the Democratic-led Senate.

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