The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday announced the relaunch of the agency’s Guidance Portal, a website to allow Americans a one-stop shop for regulatory guidance documents as part of the Trump administration’s mission to increase transparency, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
President Donald Trump, during his first administration, signed an executive order to establish Guidance Portals to increase transparency; however, the Biden administration swiftly moved to shutter the portal.
The portal aims to serve as a resource for all guidance documents managed across the EPA headquarters’ environmental programs. It is also designed to be a one-stop shop for users and small businesses to locate compliance documents of interest rather than hire expensive lawyers to help them comply with agency regulations.
David Fotouhi, whom the Senate confirmed in June to be the agency’s deputy administrator, spoke to Breitbart News about how the Guidance Portal will boost government transparency. Prior to his current role, he served as the EPA’s Acting General Counsel and Principal Deputy General Counsel under the first Trump administration. Before that, he practiced environmental law on a variety of issues.
He told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview, “We have endeavored to compile all of those in one searchable, publicly accessible database, so that if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a farmer or rancher, if you’re in any way subject to one of our regulatory requirements or statutory obligations, you can go on there and conduct a search and see very clearly what the agency’s interpretation of that requirement and how it applies to your situation. It’s in the vein of improving transparency, making sure that folks understand sort of what the agency is responsible for and what obligations they are required to meet in sort of a clear and transparent way.”
Guidance documents are agency statements of general applicability and are intended to help Americans “understand what’s required of them. They’re not supposed to be new requirements.”
Noting that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has stressed transparency, he said that the Guidance Portal works to ensure that Americans can “avoid the situation where someone, a small business owner or whoever, needs to go out and hire a high priced lawyer or a consultant just to help them understand what they need to do to comply with a particular Clean Air Act requirement, or Clean Water Act requirement.”
Fotouhi added that the database could even help find areas that the agency could streamline EPA guidance.
He explained, “That is part of the goal here is that opening this all up to the public puts them in the driver’s seat of identifying for us where there are areas where more or streamline guidance is needed, and where there may be areas that additional rulemaking or other action is necessary to provide that clarity or regulatory certainty that folks are looking for.”
Fotouhi said, “The president kicked this off in the first term with an executive order to all agencies, and we just view this as sort of keeping the flame burning and trying to carry that out here in the second term because it was a fantastic idea then, and it’s even more necessary right now.”
He said that the regulation can ensure companies can make business decisions and investments with more regulatory clarity.
The deputy administrator remarked, “They can then go about making decisions on investments and other development here that helps our economic growth without the kind of ambiguity that might be in place if there’s confusion about what’s required.”
Fotouhi teased that the agency will continue to improve the Guidance Portal to make the search feature even more robust.
He said, “We view this very much as an ongoing process, and that’s just a critical component of making sure the public has notice of what we’re doing.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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