Buried within Donald Trump’s executive order “undoing the left’s war on water pressure” was a shady phrase to help the president fast-track his deregulatory crusade.

In a section of the order signed Wednesday repealing a 13,000-word regulation defining “showerhead,” Trump noted that notice and comment on the recission would not be accepted. 

“Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal,” the order stated.  

Notice-and-comment rulemaking, as outlined by the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, requires federal agencies to give the public time to comment after presenting a new rule. The agency must then consider all relevant, timely submitted comments before publishing the final rule. 

But in his order, Trump implies that because he was the one rewriting the rule, the public would not be given the opportunity to comment, essentially fast-tracking any deregulation effort he pitches in the future. 

Legal experts were quick to challenge Trump’s rulemaking rule change. 

“This is so illegal. Just utterly, utterly unlawful,” wrote Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, in an X post Wednesday. “The President cannot overturn the commands of the APA by just declaring ‘because I said so.’”

“If President Biden could have written executive orders requiring rules just be written without comment, we’d have a whole helluva lot of new regulations on the books protecting consumers, workers, and the environment,” Todd Phillips, an assistant law professor at Robinson College of Business, wrote on X. 

In a separate post, Phillips warned that rescissions would be challenged “so, so, so quickly. And in the D.C. Circuit.”

In a separate executive order signed Wednesday, Trump ordered U.S. agencies to get moving on rescinding “unlawful” regulations under several Supreme Court decisions, including Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, by once again skipping the process of notice and comment—this time claiming a “good cause” exception. 

“In effectuating repeals of facially unlawful regulations, agency heads shall finalize rules without notice and comment, where doing so is consistent with the ‘good cause’ exception in the Administrative Procedure Act,” the order stated. “That exception allows agencies to dispense with notice-and-comment rulemaking when that process would be ‘impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest.’”

In February, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement revoking its long-standing policy of using notice-and-comment rulemaking, which could potentially allow for expedited reforms to Medicaid programs. 

The public reaction to Donald Trump’s tariff reversal has not been good.

CNN’s John Berman decided to spew off a list of headlines Thursday morning related to the market frenzy while introducing Republican strategist David Urban, who was left with little more than sticks and stones and some misdirection to defend the president’s whiplash tariff rollout and his subsequent cave.

“Let’s go over some of the headlines and leads in today’s papers,” Berman started. “The Washington Post, ‘Trump Blinked.’ Wall Street Journal opinion, ‘Trump Blinks.’ The New York Times lede says ‘Bond Yields cause Mr. Trump to blink.’ The Financial Times, ‘Why did Donald Trump buckle?’

“And just for the sugar on top here, Politico says, ‘Getting yippy with it,’ and Puck says, ‘Un-liberation Day,’” Berman continued.

“So David Urban, blink, blink, buckle,” Berman concluded, before asking Urban, “Was this all bungled?”

“No, John, I don’t think it was bungled. I think that the markets got a little skittish,” Urban said. “I think the House and Senate are working diligently to get this tax bill done and get some things pushed through.”

Urban then blamed the markets, claiming that if investors “were a bit more patient,” they would have seen the administration get “a lot of good things done.” The lobbyist then posited that a forthcoming “stablecoin bill” would make the U.S. dollar stronger again on a global scale.

“However, you know, the bond markets, as you noted there, really put a scare into the administration, I think, when the cost of borrowing for the federal government goes way, way up and the U.S. dollar doesn’t become the reserve currency, which was what it looks like when you have a bond market sell-off like it was happening,” Urban said. “I think that’s what caused the pause button to be pushed.”

But Urban conceded, ultimately, that no one can know how the markets will react.

Trump appeared to intentionally sow volatility last week, when he announced some 200 tariffs on countries around the world (whose rates were discovered to be founded on bad math). After a week of panicked investors and a tanking economy, as well as a midday trade war with China, Trump decided to undo it all, with the White House revealing that it would be pausing the majority of its tariffs (except on China) and lowering the tariffs to a universal baseline rate of 10 percent. That sent the market into a different kind of frenzy, whose biggest winners were the demographic already with the most money: billionaires.

In its latest attack on the free press, the Trump administration is withholding pool reports that make it look bad.

Two recent dispatches from White House pool reporters, a rotating group of reporters designated to cover the president and share information with the rest of the press corps, never made it public, Status reported Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, Dallas Morning News reporter Joseph Gordon, who was in the pool that day, sent a standard email noting that reporters were following Trump to a dinner but that two photographers from the Associated Press were “turned away from joining the pool.” The pool report never made it to news outlets, Gordon later learned. In February, the Associated Press was banned from the White House press pool for refusing to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, but a judge ordered the White House to lift the ban Tuesday.

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