Donald Trump

Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from the San Joaquin valley, "once said all he wanted to do was work on a dairy farm," says a profile by The Associated Press of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "He's a long way from raising cattle."

President Trump’s budget slashes all funding to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program, but environmental activists and bipartisan supporters of the program say they are prepared for a sustained fight with the President, says The Washington Post.

After wildfires killed seven people and ravaged more than a million acres of rangeland in Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle, ranchers say they aren’t getting the relief they need from the federal government, reports The New York Times.

President Trump will soon cancel the Obama-era policy that demanded federal agencies account for the “social cost of carbon” when drafting new regulations, says Reuters. Under Obama, agency officials had to quantify the economic damage of an activity, like coal mining or oil drilling, based on its contribution to climate change.

An ethanol industry trade group says President Trump's decision to review fuel economy standards for automobiles set by his predecessor could mean a larger role for "high octane, low carbon fuels" such as renewable fuels. Trump announced "the big news that we're going to work on the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards, so you can make cars in America again" during a speech in Detroit.

Even as it waits for President Trump to nominate a new secretary of Labor, the Department of Labor is rolling back policies meant to prevent worker safety violations, says The New York Times. “In a sharp break with the past, the department has stopped publicizing fines against companies. As of Monday, seven weeks after the inauguration of President Trump, the department had yet to post a single news release about an enforcement fine,” says the Times.

It will take more than a year to write, but President Trump ordered a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government, to streamline its operation and discard unneeded programs. The project, under the control of the White House budget office, could provide an opening for calls to create a single food-safety agency, to centralize federal oversight of genetically engineered plants and animals, or to combine public nutrition programs that sprawl across several agencies.

President Trump selected a physician and political conservative, Scott Gottlieb, to become commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, the White House announced. If confirmed, he will succeed Robert Califf, who held the job for the final 11 months of the Obama administration. Gottlieb was deputy FDA commissioner for medical and scientific affairs during the second term of President George W. Bush.

President Trump has often doubted the validity of climate change, but his public comments on the topic also haven’t been straightforward, says The New York Times. In 2009, Trump was one of 50 business leaders who took out a full-page ad in the Times urging “meaningful and effective measures to combat climate change.” But just a few years later, in his 2015 book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” he writes: “To begin with, the whole push for renewable energy is being driven by the wrong motivation, the mistaken belief that global climate change is being caused by carbon emissions.”

The number of undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped 40 percent since President Trump took office. “About 840 people a day were caught trying to cross the border or deemed inadmissible after presenting themselves at a port of entry in February, down from about 1,370 a day in January, according to new figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” says the LA Times.

Producers are worried about economic conditions in the farm sector and forecasts of a continued slump in farm income are eroding their confidence about the future, say Purdue University economists. The Purdue Ag Economy Barometer fell by 19 points during February, taking some air out of the "Trump bump" in farmer confidence that began in November and lifted producer sentiment to a record high in January.

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, the Trump administration's nominee for U.S. ambassador to China, says he is assured that a change in the Renewable Fuels Standard sought by oil refiners "is not going to happen," reported Radio Iowa. But a White House official told Reuters the proposal was under review, although the administration took no position "either way on this issue at this time."

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch has a mixed record when it comes to rulings on public lands and environmental issues, says Fortune, based on an Associated Press review of Gorsuch’s case history. "I think that his record, although the number of cases is quite limited, shows that at times it has led to decisions that one might consider environmentally favorable, and about an equal number of times it has led to decisions some might think are environmentally unfavorable," said Donald Kochan, associate dean and professor at Chapman University's Dale E. Fowler School of Law.

The Trump Administration budget calls for cutting EPA jobs by one fifth — from 15,000 to 12,000 — and slicing the agency’s annual budget from $8.2 billion a year to $6.1 billion, says The Washington Post.