WaPo fact checker rejects Buttigieg's claim that Trump’s regulatory reform caused Ohio wreck.
Hawley also errs in finding relation between the wreck and U.S. support for Ukraine.
Pete Buttigieg has tried to blame the East Palestine, Ohio train wreck on the Trump administration. He claims that Trump rolled back regulations that could have prevented the disaster.
Does the evidence support Buttigieg’s claim? Not according to the Washington Post’s lead fact checker, Glenn Kessler.
He writes:
We decided to examine every possible regulatory change made under Trump that could be related to the accident and assess whether it could have made an impact. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said the Norfolk Southern crew received an alert about an overheated wheel bearing and was trying to slow the train before it came off the tracks.
From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.
Kessler begins by considering the Trump administration’s 2017 repeal of an Obama-era rule that would have required ECP (electronically controlled pneumatic) brakes on “high hazard” trains that carry flammable hazardous materials. The repeal occurred because the Department of Transportation concluded that the costs of the regulation outweighed its benefits. The Biden-Buttigieg DOT didn’t move to reinstate the rule.
As just noted, the rule rejected by the Trump DOT would have required ECP brakes on “high hazard” trains. The train that caused the Ohio disaster did not fit the rule’s definition of such a train. Thus, National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said on Twitter that the train wouldn’t have bad ECP brakes even if the rule had been in place.
Cynthia Quarterman, who helped write the rule, told Kessler that if it had not been delayed and shelved, ECP brakes might have been widely adopted by industry and could have ended up on this train. This highly speculative claim smacks of partisanship and sour grapes. Kessler is right to stick with the NTSB chair’s view and conclude that repeal of the rule was not a contributing the derailment.
Next, Kessler considered a 2020 Trump administration rule that increased the amount of time a freight rail train can be parked with its air brake system depressurized before a new brake inspection is required. The rule sets this time at 24 hours, which is similar to the rule in Canada. Before the rule change, the U.S. limit was four hours.
According to Kessler, there has been no determination that this change played any role in the accident.
Trump also rejected an Obama administration proposed a rule to require two-person crews on all trains. This decision has no relevance to the Ohio crash because the train in question had a two-person crew.
What about the Trump administration’s 2020 revision of minimum safety requirements for railroad track. Here, again, Kessler finds no relevance to the derailment. “The NTSB inspected the tracks, and the preliminary report makes no mention of any problem.”
Kessler similarly dismisses any suggestion that Trump’s non-renewal of a Federal Railway Administration audit program and its lowering of standards for regulating emissions of ethylene oxide have relevance here. The latter concerned emissions by chemical plants, not the synthetic chemical released in the accident.
The Post says that Trump’s regulatory roll back can’t be blamed for the Ohio derailment “so far.” That’s fair because analysis of the accident isn’t complete yet.
I just wish the Post and the mainstream media as a whole were similarly cautious in their reporting of controversial assertions by conservatives, such as Tom Cotton’s suggestion that the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic originated in a Chinese lab. I don’t recall any outlet saying there was no evidence to support this claim “so far.” (Of course, the proximity of the lab to where the pandemic began was evidence in itself.) Instead, the Post denounced Cotton’s suggestion as “a fringe theory.” Now, it looks like the virus probably did spread from a Chinese lab.
But let’s return to the East Palestine crash, and what may or may not be relevant to it. Josh Hawley told Tucker Carlson that our support of Ukraine is related to this disaster. And in a blast email, he added that “Democrats continue to prioritize writing blank-checks for Ukraine while totally ignoring the ongoing disaster in East Palestine.”
This is nonsense. First, no one has written a “blank check” for Ukraine. Second, Dems haven’t “totally ignored” the train wreck disaster.
Third, our bipartisan financial support for Ukraine has nothing to do with the Biden administration’s weak response to the disaster in Ohio, as even Carlson stipulated. There’s no reason to believe the response would be any more robust if we were not backing Ukraine. These are not competing priorities.
The Hawley line reminds me of liberals who used to criticize U.S. space exploration in light of poverty in the U.S. But Hawley is even more misguided because fighting poverty, liberal style, requires enormous federal expenditures. Responding to the Ohio disaster does not.
Buttigieg and Hawley are both off base. Buttigieg is flying in the face of facts. Hawley is engaging in hyperbole and drawing a specious comparison.