Joe Biden’s mismanagement is still hurting our nation. It takes a while to clean it all up.
And Trump just trashed a Biden rule that will unleash the economy.
For years, American manufacturers watched helplessly as the Biden administration piled unworkable environmental mandate after unworkable environmental mandate onto an already overburdened industry, all in the name of climate goals that sounded good in a press release but bore little relationship to actual engineering and economic reality. This week, the Trump administration finally gave manufacturers something to celebrate, rolling back a sweeping set of Biden-era power plant emissions standards that industry leaders say were never realistic to begin with.
Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, didn’t hold back his enthusiasm for the change. “It really sent a signal to manufacturers that the administration was listening to our concerns,” Timmons told Fox News Digital, crediting EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for delivering exactly the kind of regulatory relief the manufacturing sector has been demanding for years.
Timmons made clear that NAM and its member companies weren’t quiet about their objections when the Biden administration first rolled out its 2024 emissions standards. “We were very, very clear” in raising concerns at the time, Timmons said, describing the previous administration’s approach in blunt terms: the standards were “simply unworkable.” That’s not industry spin — that’s the assessment of the organization representing the very companies that would have had to actually comply with rules that, according to manufacturers themselves, were divorced from practical reality.
Timmons was careful to note that the underlying goals weren’t the problem. “The timeline that they had proposed was just, it wasn’t feasible. Not that the aspirations for, you know, for cleaner air and a healthier environment aren’t good aspirations. I think we all share that. I know the current EPA and Administrator Zeldin certainly share those objectives, but how you get there really matters and whether manufacturers are able to meet the challenge,” he said. In other words, nobody in the manufacturing sector is arguing against clean air or a healthy environment — they’re arguing against regulatory timelines set by bureaucrats with no apparent regard for whether American businesses could actually comply with them without shutting down operations or shedding jobs.
This is a crucial distinction that often gets lost in the broader climate policy debate. Manufacturers aren’t opposed to environmental progress on principle — they’re opposed to top-down mandates crafted without meaningful industry input, imposed on unrealistic timelines, and often designed more to satisfy activist pressure than to achieve genuine environmental improvement through sound engineering and sensible phase-in periods.
Timmons was refreshingly candid about the fact that the previous administration wasn’t ignorant of manufacturers’ concerns — they simply chose to disregard them. He noted that the Biden EPA had heard the industry’s objections clearly but “simply disagreed,” prioritizing an aggressive political timeline over the practical realities facing American factories, power plants, and the workers who depend on them for their livelihoods.
While celebrating this week’s rollback, Timmons was clear-eyed about the limits of executive action alone. He emphasized that lasting regulatory certainty for manufacturers ultimately needs to come through congressional legislation rather than relying solely on executive orders that can simply be reversed the moment a different administration takes power. “Uncertainty is the absolute worst enemy for manufacturers because manufacturers are on a very long-term horizon when it comes to planning and strategy, product development, research development, so when administrations change, there has often been kind of that pendulum swing,” Timmons explained.
That’s an important and often overlooked point in the broader regulatory debate. Manufacturing decisions, from building new facilities to investing in updated equipment, often require planning horizons stretching a decade or more. When environmental and economic regulations swing wildly from one administration to the next, depending purely on which party controls the White House, it creates exactly the kind of business uncertainty that discourages the long-term investment America needs to keep its manufacturing base competitive on the global stage.
Beyond the emissions rollback itself, Timmons flagged permitting reform as the next major frontier where manufacturers need Washington’s attention. According to NAM’s own polling, a striking 80 percent of manufacturers say the length and complexity of the current permitting process is actively harmful to increasing investment in American manufacturing capacity. That’s an extraordinary consensus within an industry not typically known for uniform agreement on policy questions.
The upside of fixing this problem could be substantial. NAM’s polling found that as many as 87 percent of manufacturers said they would expand business operations, hire more workers, or increase wages and benefits for existing employees if the permitting process were meaningfully streamlined. That’s not a marginal improvement — that’s the kind of number that should have every member of Congress, regardless of party, paying close attention to permitting reform as a genuine jobs and wages issue rather than an obscure regulatory footnote.
Timmons stressed that getting this right requires Congress to actually engage directly with the manufacturers who understand these challenges firsthand, rather than crafting legislation in a vacuum. “There needs to be more opportunities for business to be at the table. To really explain what the art of the possible is,” he said. “No one is saying that we should not be working hard to achieve cleaner air, cleaner water, healthier communities. In fact, we’re saying exactly that. We should be part of the solution to make that happen.” That’s a reasonable, constructive position that deserves a genuine hearing on Capitol Hill rather than the kind of top-down regulatory approach that characterized the previous administration.
This latest EPA action fits into a broader pattern of deregulatory moves from the Trump administration aimed at removing the kind of bureaucratic red tape that has hamstrung American industry for years. Combined with the administration’s earlier rollback of the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the scientific determination that has underpinned much of the federal government’s climate-related regulatory authority for over a decade and a half, this represents a serious and sustained effort to rebalance environmental policy in favor of practical economic outcomes rather than symbolic gestures.
For American manufacturers who’ve spent years navigating a regulatory environment that seemed increasingly disconnected from operational reality, this week’s announcement offers genuine relief and renewed confidence. But as Timmons rightly points out, the real work is only beginning. Executive orders can be reversed by the next administration just as easily as they were issued by this one. If Republicans in Congress are serious about giving American manufacturers the long-term regulatory certainty they need to invest, hire, and compete globally, permitting reform and legislative action need to follow quickly, before the political window for meaningful, lasting change closes.
