[The Hill] The Trump administration will take its final step to repeal the Obama administration’s 2015 rule setting standards for hydraulic fracturing on federal land.A formal notice from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) making the repeal final was posted publicly Thursday and is due to be published in the Federal Register Friday.
The repeal is part of a broad Trump administration effort to repeal environmental rules it finds unnecessary and to promote domestic production of fossil fuels and other energy sources.
"This final rule is needed to prevent the unnecessarily burdensome and unjustified administrative requirements and compliance costs of the 2015 rule from encumbering oil and gas development on federal and Indian lands," the BLM wrote in the notice.
The BLM’s notice does not take a position on whether the agency ever had legal authority to enforce the law. Republicans and the oil industry say that it did not, as did a federal judge in Wyoming who overturned the rule, only to be later overruled on appeal.