There are two big things to consider even if Congress didn’t change the laws significantly. The first is that Congress delegates the power to decide exactly what’s covered by a law to the agencies, on the theory that they employ experts and can adjust over time faster than a legal change. Under Trump, a significant number of regulations were changed at the behest of the affected industries:
The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.
The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.
It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...
The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.
The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.
It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.