via Reuters by John Whitesides
Over his first nine months, Trump has used an aggressive series of regulatory rollbacks, executive orders and changes in enforcement guidelines to rewrite the rules for industries from energy to airlines, and on issues from campus sexual assault to anti-discrimination protections for transgender students.
While his administration has been chaotic, and his decision-making impulsive and sometimes whimsical, Trump has made changes that could have far-reaching and lingering consequences for society and the economy. Some have grabbed headlines but many, no less consequential, have gone largely unnoticed amid the daily controversies and Twitter insults that have marked Trump's early months in office.
Under Trump, oil is flowing through the Dakota Access Pipeline. Arrests of immigrants living illegally in the United States are up. More federal lands are open for coal mining.
The administration has left its mark in smaller ways, as well. Trump has rolled back or delayed Obama-era rules and regulations that protected retirement savings from unscrupulous financial advisers, made it harder for companies that violated labor laws to land federal contracts and restricted what internet service providers could do with their customers’ personal data.
Those kinds of low-profile policy shifts are far from the dramatic change promised by the headline-loving Trump, who won the White House with a vow to fundamentally reshape Washington. But the effects can be just as real.
“Trump is doing an awful lot to shape policy and blow up policy,” said Norm Ornstein, a political analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The complete story here > Beyond the daily drama and Twitter battles, Trump begins to alter American life