We hope you had a nice Presidents' Day.

By far the biggest policy news of the past 48 hours is that OIRA published a new interim final rule, implementing EO 12866, removing the implementing regulations of NEPA.

What that means, according to a great post by IFP's Thomas Hochman is that it gets rid of one of the worst roadblocks to actually building new and cool stuff in America.

In particular, this was President Carter's 1977 EO which empowered the Council on Environmental Quality to issue binding NEPA regulations. CEQ no longer has rulemaking power.

Since the Carter Administration, CEQ has decided how every Federal agency must conduct environmental reviews, and its rules were binding. Writes Hochman, "Without those binding regulations in place, agencies are free to adopt much narrower definitions of terms like "significance" and “major federal action,” trim back their alternatives analyses, and treat factors like environmental justice or greenhouse gas emissions as optional rather than mandatory considerations."

Policy News You Need To Know

#Immigration #H1B — Arresting news from CIS: "Manav Bharti University in India has been involved in a fake degree scheme since at least 2010. […] That raises the obvious question: How many H-1B visas have been granted to graduates of Manav Bharti University? The Center for Immigration Studies submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to USCIS asking that question. USCIS recently responded with the answer: It has no idea." Great!

#Antitrust — Interesting, from Mike Davis of Article III Project: "The Trump 47 Justice Department Antitrust Division announced it will continue the bipartisan antitrust renaissance, started under Trump 45, by keeping the 2023 merger guidelines."

#Reg — A-ha. American Action Forum's Dan Goldbeck susses out a "modest thaw" in the Trump Administration's regulatory freeze.

#DEI — Good article from Scott Yenor at The American Mind on DEI policies at the University of Notre Dame (strange for a Catholic institution to embrace racial discrimination).