Yesterday, Chuck Schumer joined the chorus of Democrats blaming the Trump administration for the Ohio train accident. He said, “The Trump administration repealed requirements for an electronic braking system because, according to them, the safety benefits were not worth the cost . . . I think the people of East Palestine now know that analysis was wrong and that they’re suffering the consequences of rail companies putting profits over people.”
He’s repeating a line that Pete Buttigieg and White House officials have been spouting for weeks. It’s not true, and they know it’s not true.
First, the Trump administration did not repeal a requirement for electronic braking systems. The requirement for electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, which the Obama administration pushed in 2015, never came into effect. The Trump administration abandoned it. It did so based on a National Academy of Sciences report ordered by Congress that found the safety benefits of the braking system to be inconclusive and a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that questioned the Obama administration’s data supporting the rule.
Only in Washington-speak does refusing to adopt new regulations count as deregulation. A similar linguistic trick is already present in budget conversations, where increasing spending by less than projections is called a “spending cut.” On ECP brakes, the Trump administration made no changes; it didn’t reduce regulation.
Second, the Obama rule would not have applied to the East Palestine train. Even if the Trump administration had adopted this rule, the train wouldn’t be required to have ECP brakes. The accident does not tell us anything about ECP brakes, and there’s no evidence yet in the NTSB’s work that suggests a braking problem contributed to the accident.
I explained this twice before, as did the editors, but you don’t have to take our word for it. NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy explained it on Twitter nearly two weeks ago. She used the word “misinformation” in her thread, debunking the idea that this Obama ECP brake rule had anything to do with the accident. Even Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post wrote yesterday, “None of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.”
Democrats continue to repeat a line that we have known to be false for weeks to blame the accident on the Trump administration. Homendy called it “misinformation” two weeks ago. But at this point, propagation of this falsehood must be willful, which elevates it to “disinformation,” a term that apparently includes Democratic immunity.