The House and Senate are both in session this week. On Monday, the House will consider six bills under suspension of the rules. For the remainder of the week, the House will vote on a Congressional Review Act disapproval resolution (H.J.Res.83) nullifying a Dec. 2016 Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation that extended by five years the timeframe during which employers could be cited for record-keeping violations; the Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome (SCRUB) Act (H.R. 998), which would require federal agencies to repeal existing regulations to offset the cost of new rules and would create a five-year commission to prioritize rules that are more than 15 years old and aim to reduce the cumulative costs of federal regulations by 15 percent; the OIRA Insight, Reform, and Accountability Act ( H.R. 1009), which would formally enshrine the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) into statute and would bar federal agencies from issuing rules with significant economic effects unless OIRA determined the agency took certain required actions, such as assessing costs and benefits, considering alternatives, and minimizing the burden on businesses and local governments; and the Regulatory Integrity Act of 2017 ( H.R. 1004), which would mandate federal agencies post copies of all steps and communications involved in their rulemaking activities online and also bars agencies from promoting their regulations using social media, language that comes in response to efforts by the EPA to promote its "Waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rule that the GAO later concluded violated the law.

 

The Senate this week will vote on the nominations of Wilbur Ross to be U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) to be U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Ben Carson to be U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Rick Perry to be U.S. Secretary of Energy. Former Indiana Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on his nomination to be the Director of National Intelligence. With Senate Democrats making a practice of using the maximum debate time allowed on nominees, the next batch of Trump picks probably will consume the bulk of the week.

 

President Trump will deliver his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night at 9pm ET in the House chamber, laying out his case for making the agenda of his campaign the law of the land. He will likely talk about controlling immigration, cutting taxes, abolishing regulations, repealing the Affordable Care Act, pulling out of multinational trade agreements and spending more on defense and homeland security. Trump is also expected to sign two Executive Orders this week on climate and water pollution. The first order instructs the EPA to begin rewriting the 2015 regulation that limits greenhouse-gas emissions from existing electric utilities and also instructs the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing. The second order instructs the EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to revamp the 2015 WOTUS rule , which applies to 60 percent of the water bodies in the country. Trump may also sign a revised travel Executive Order this week to rectify the issues raised by federal courts over his January 27 travel ban.