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The deconstruction of President Obama’s environmental agenda continues apace, with the most sweeping regulatory component of the last administration now in the sights of the Trump White House. On Tuesday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt formally proposed a rule to repeal the 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP) aimed at slowing global warming. “The war on coal is over,” Pruitt said Monday at an event in Kentucky, announcing his intentions.  A former Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt previously sued the Obama administration to kill…

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Equifax is practically a money printing press, and stands to profit handsomely from its recent loss of sensitive data on almost 150 million Americans, according to the Senate Banking Committee. Questions about Equifax executives making insider trades off the recent breach were among others about the credit rating agency’s possible monetization of its system-wide failure earlier this year, lawmakers told now former-CEO Richard Smith. Both Democrats and Republicans railed at Smith at a hearing on Wednesday, likening Equifax to a bumbling protection racket. They lamented…

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Wells Fargo claims to have changed after its fake accounts scandal made headlines last year, but the bank still seems poised to rip off customers and workers, Senate Democrats said on Tuesday. At a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, they questioned the integrity of Wells executives and said the framework is still there for the bank to continue to push the boundaries of legality and ethics. “The Federal Reserve should remove all of the current board members who served during the fake accounts scam,”…

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Republican leaders in the House have finally set a date to consider a bill reauthorizing a program providing health care assistance to tens of millions of Americans, specifically children. Unfortunately for the roughly 36 million people who currently rely on the Children Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the date scheduled for markup of the legislation falls after the initiative expires. The House Energy and Commerce Committee announced it would consider CHIP reauthorization on October 4, three days after it sunsets. So far details about the legislation have not been publicly…

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Federal food safety inspectors, in recent years, discovered a facility with a leaky roof and the presence of a life-threatening bacteria. But Food and Drug Administration officials merely issued a warning to the firm’s owners, only to repeatedly discover the same problems over the next 24 months. “Three subsequent inspections documented that the facility did not correct the violations, and FDA continued to find unsanitary conditions and the presence of Listeria monocytogenes,” a federal watchdog report stated this week. The findings were among discoveries in…

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The top Democrat overseeing financial markets pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize an executive pay “clawback” regulation in the wake of the massive Equifax data breach. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) prodded SEC Chair Jay Clayton on Tuesday to finish the rulemaking process, which was initially ordered more than seven years ago by Dodd-Frank financial reform. “I intend to finish the mandate. There is a prioritization,” Clayton told Brown, the vice chair of the Senate Banking Committee. “I am going to be very open with…

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