The David Knight Show - Interview: The Regulation Trap Strangling America

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Myron Ebell of FixTheEPAVeto.org zeroes in on a regulatory time bomb most people have never heard of — Section 404C of the Clean Water Act, which allows the EPA to veto a mining or infrastructure project after billions have already been invested and construction has begun, making serious capital commitment essentially impossible. The problem goes deeper than any one provision: China controls the processing of nearly every critical mineral the U.S. needs for AI, defense, and manufacturing, while domestic mining faces 10-20 year permitting gauntlets driven entirely by litigation from environmental groups.Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Myron Ebell. He is with fix the EPA veto.org. And he's been pushing a deregulation agenda for quite some time. And as you know, I've talked about this. I think the greatest problem that we have here in the U.S. in terms of being able to grow our economy and being able to have manufacturing, all the rest of the stuff,

is the strangling regulations coming out of Washington. And probably nowhere is that worse than in the, in the environmental regulations. And so, Myron Ebell was part of the transition team in Trump's first administration. I know some of the people that were part of that. I had worked with them at American Tradition Institute,

which now has become E&E News. And so they had some high expectations. Some good things were done. Some things were left incomplete. That's kind of the way that it always works. But we're going to talk about some of the issues that still remain. and a major loophole that is there that is going to allow, if it's not closed, it's going to allow the rapid reassertment of some of the things that have been removed. So joining us now is Myron Ebell.

Thank you so much for joining us, sir. Thanks for having me, David. Well, thank you. Tell us a little bit about what you're looking at. When you talk about a gaping hole in the deregulatory push, what are you talking about in terms of the Clean Water Act? Well, there are a number of environmental laws that are a problem and that need reform and making faster. But one problem that the Trump administration has not focused on is what happens if there is an unfriendly administration in the future, a radical environmental administration and the Democrats seem to be moving further and further to the left on these issues.

So it's quite likely that a future Democratic administration would be more radical than the Biden or the Obama administration. Well, that's kind of interesting because, you know, once they decided that they needed to have a lot of power for the artificial intelligence data centers, things started to rapidly change. I mean, that really kind of through a lot, just defenestrated a lot of this doom and gloom climate stuff. right out the window when they decide that, wait a minute, we've got this very powerful use for artificial intelligence. We need to clear the decks to get this thing in so we can have our police surveillance state or whatever. But so in terms of reading the tea leaves, they're still talking about moving in a very radical environmental way that you're looking at. Yes, I think so. I think there's a, you know, the tech community has moved over to the Trump side

of these issues. But I, I don't think the Democrats have caught up with that yet. And so, you know, the Trump, there's a lot of pressure in Congress to, on permitting reform. I doubt that the Senate will be able to do anything, but there is a lot of pressure because, as you said, the deregulation is necessary to be able to build things in this country. Yeah. There's so many layers and it takes so long and there's so much litigation. And so the Trump administration in its first term tried to address that and made some progress. And in the second term, I think they're being much more aggressive. They're trying to speed up, do everything they can without Congress changing the laws.

They're doing everything they can to speed up the permitting of projects. And we're talking about energy projects, mining projects, major infrastructure projects. But speeding all these things up is good. but there's something in the Clean Water Act that could undo all of the progress that's being made to get these projects through the process and let the companies start building them. And that is called the Section 404C veto. And what it means is that the core of engineers can permit a project for a dredgeon fill permit that is digging up dirt and rock and moving in and putting it somewhere else. they can issue that permit. The investors can start investing and building that project,

but the Section 404C veto means that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, can veto that project after it's being built. And so this is a huge threat. And the main point I want to make is, if you are trying to arrange billions of dollars to build a new pipeline or open a new pipeline, or open a new mine.

Are you going to take that risk if you think after you've invested your money, it could just be yanked? I don't think so. Yeah, recently, I've talked to several people that have been in mining, and we've had the bottleneck that everybody's talked about in terms of rare earth. And so we've got a lot of people out there trying to do it, and they're talking about how it takes us 20 years and we're still not sure that we're going to get this. We invest billions of dollars up front, and it's a real casino with all that stuff. I think one of the things that's happening with this that's different.

Again, going back to AI and as you point out, the tech people, we have put so much money into all things digital, and yet we don't have the mining and the manufacturing and the materials basis to make all the stuff work. You know, if they're going to have massive data centers, they're going to have to have a lot of copper. They're going to have to have a lot of these other resources. And there just isn't the pipeline there for that does not exist.

to make sure that we have what we need to build that out, assuming that we want to have all these massive data centers, which I think is another question is out there. They're used that it's going to be put to. So it's always a question. Whatever their agenda is, they have to look at the practical aspects of it. And we really have neglected the physical infrastructure

throughout our country for everything, not just for AI data centers. But that's kind of the thing that's really grabbed people in terms of changing a lot of people. those minds on all the climate hysteria. They backed off a little bit on that. And I think that's one of the key things that's there. And it's just astounding when you talk about the amount of time that it takes to get

something approved, let alone to build it. That's absolutely right, David. I think, you know, there's several things that any industry needs. They need material, and that's often metals and. and minerals, and they need energy. And the Trump administration combined with the Shale revolution, going back to the 20 years now, that opened up these huge new resources of oil and natural gas in the rock, in shale formations, those and the Trump policies that have allowed that to to explode means that the United States is in an incredibly good position now in terms of its

energy. Now, many states are trying to hamstring that like California and New York with their idiotic climate policies. They want to raise the price of energy, not lower it. But the U.S. is in a great position on energy, but on other raw materials, it's in a very bad position. And I'll just start with minerals. You know, there's large parts of the United States are heavily mineralized. There's a lot of places

that can be mined, but a lot of those have been closed off. And when companies try to open mines, they face 10 to 20 years of getting through the permitting process before they can actually start building the mine. And a lot of that,

the permitting process is is controlled by litigation. Every agency has to go very slowly and take very detailed environmental impact statements because they know they're going to be sued in court by environmental and preservation groups. So it takes a long time. And then even worse than the fact that so much of our mining, our minerals are now imported from abroad is that China control. the production of several critical minerals,

but even more it controls the processing, the smelting and the processing, of turning the rock, the ore into metals and minerals that can be used. So, you know, for example, cobalt, most of its mind in Africa in the Congo, but it's all processed in China. So China really has a chokehold, not only on our economy, but on the entire world economy,

for a number of critical minerals that are used, as you mentioned, AI and these big tech companies, cell phones, EV batteries. You know, and I was talking to a guy who had a company that was trying to do the rare earth minerals, and again, they're desperate for it for their defense industry in Washington. And he was saying, it isn't that these minerals are rare.

It's just that we don't have the ability to refine them. And that's all being done in China now. Yep, that's right. Yeah. That's interesting. And, of course, it's the other part of this, when I look at what is happening with these things, and look, you know, I mean, it's, there are some things that need to be done, but it, the, pendulum can fall way to the extreme of one side, and I think that's where we are right now.

And so when you look at this, I remember when I was in high school reading my dad's Business Week magazines. And one of the things that really stuck out to me was the fact that they talked about, they talked about how Europe was paralyzed with regulation. They called it eurosclerosis. Yeah. And it was kind of a hardening of the arteries so they couldn't get anything done. And we have now followed them down that same path. We have a kind of sclerosis here that has paralyzed us, really. That's right. And a lot of it, you know, these environmental laws that were passed in the early 1970s, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the End

In the Interred Species Act and several others, including the National Environmental Policy Act, all of these laws have never really been reformed. There have been, I guess you could say, the 1992 Clean Air Act amendments that the First Bush administration did was the last major reform of any of these laws. And that was not a good reform. That was actually, it had some good and it had some really bad stuff in it. And so our laws have not kept pace with the changes in the world and in the way things work. And the second thing is that nobody who passed these laws, I think the environmental groups knew,

but the lawmakers didn't understand how all of these laws could be gamed by our court system. so that if, for example, a permit is issued, that an environmental group can come in and sue, and if they lose, they can come in on some other grants or some other group can come in and sue again. And so these things are held up now for years and years and years in the courts. And instead of having regulators who know something about the issue, we hope, making the decisions. We have judges essentially making our environmental and industrial policy. And many of them really are not very favorable. They don't like, for example, the shutdown of the timber industry in the Northwest in the 1990s and early 2000s. That was all done by one federal court judge who essentially took control of the timber industry through the endangered

Species Act. Wow. And so these are the kinds of things that when you talk about sclerosis, a lot of it, I think, is legal and in the courts. It's the agencies are bad, but the courts are even worse generally. Wow. Yeah. And we're talking about the Pacific Northwest, personal experience that I had in terms of

a report that I did. My son and I went up and we interviewed a guy who was a lumberjack and had been up in that area. He said the federal government has basically. shut everything down. They'd done such a bad job of managing the public lands that he had been, as part of his preparation for his retirement, he had gradually accumulated a lot of land, and he was going to gradually sell off that lumber as he retired. And he said what happened was the mismanagement of the federal lands because they refused to get rid of deadwood and other things like that.

They would leave this fuel, which is what it becomes, fuel on the ground. You know, so we've got trees that are dying, trees that have fallen down, and it's basically fuel for a fire, even a natural fire. And getting out of control, he said it got out of control, burned the federal lands, and burned up his retirement as well. And he said, and look around here. He said, there's absolutely nothing left. He said, look at all of the different lumber mills and things like that. They were all rusted and decaying. It was really sad to look at it. We did a long report on it. and all the lumber mills were rusted and decaying, and he said there's nobody moving into the area.

All the businesses have closed. The only thing that is happening here, he says we've got retirees who are moving into the area, and we've got the federal government is opening one office after the other. He said, that's the only thing that's going is the federal government. I thought, what a picture of overreach that we have with that. Of course, we all want to make sure, and this is where the EPA started. It started with these super funds.

They had some really horrific places of pollution, and they cleaned those up. I don't know if you know David Schnare or not, but I worked with him at E&A. He was E&E, and he was one of the earliest TPA employees, and he was there for over 30 years, and when he got out, he was so disgusted by the overreach

and how this had grown into mission creep that had grown in, and it became not about cleaning up pollution, but it became about shutting down any growth and any reasonable use of the land. And so he went, to the other side. He started opposing what they were doing because it had changed from the mission of cleaning things up to a mission of making sure that we don't do anything. Yes, that's right. And David learned that from the inside. David Schneer learned that from the

inside. And he knew how he knew how the beast worked. And of course, the civil service is meant to be experts who are who are not politically motivated, but the EPA is, you know, one of the worst agencies in terms of being highly politicized and having, and I'm not saying everybody who works there is, is on the environmentalist team, but there are enough people, especially in senior roles, who are very hostile to development. and economic growth. They think that those, you know, if the economy is growing, the environment must be doing being hurt.

And in fact, the opposite is true. Economic growth is what drives environmental health and progress. And if you go back to the Clean Water Act, you know, huge areas of the country have been designated as federal wetlands. Yes. And some of the, many of them are wetlands. If there's a swamp that's next to a river or the swamp drains into the river, that's a federal jurisdiction. And the federal government can regulate it, even on private land, not just federal land or state land.

But the claims of what is a wetland grew so large that most of Arizona was under the Obama rule, of wetlands of the U.S. rule, which the Biden administration revived, would be defined as a wetland because these desert canyons would have water coming down them every few years, and that makes them a wetland. And so the Trump administration had tried to reform the wetland rule in the first administration, but the Supreme Court has done an even better job with several decisions. And so the federal claims of jurisdiction over wetlands are not. nearly as big now as they are. Nonetheless, if you are involved in any kind of project that moves a lot of dirt and rock, and you need a dredge and fill permit, you are likely, if it's a pipeline

or a road or a mine, you are likely to have federal jurisdiction through the Clean Water Act, through wetlands jurisdiction. And that means you will have to get a Section 404 permit. And that's why it's so important to try to speed up the process, but it's also important to correct this loophole that was created that allows the EPA to veto the project after it's been permitted and is underway. Yeah, I remember there was a case. I think it was in Montana. It was a guy on his own property. He didn't have a massive ranch or anything. He's only something like eight acres or something like that.

and he had a couple of cows and they dug out a little recessed area so they can make their own pond for the kids would swim in it and the cows would drink from it and that type of thing. And the EPA came in and tried to regulate that under the Waters of the USA Act and say that was something that they should regulate. It was all self-contained in his property. He had created it and they got really, they came after him, started hitting him with five. it started accumulating and multiplying and adding late charges to it, they wound up with an astronomical amount of money. And as he was fighting it, and then they tried to garnish his wages, because that wasn't what he was doing for a living. It wasn't a farm that he was doing. It was just something that they had done on the side. And it was one of the most egregious cases I've

seen of any of this kind of stuff. But it just shows how they have metastasized in terms of their mission, how it is creeped out of the confines of common sense. They even tried to garnish his wages, like some kind of an income tax thing or something. It was absolutely amazing. And the fact that they would extend the wetlands to the deserts, that is also a good example of how this has fallen off to the other side. And again, we're not talking about being unreasonable for things. Certainly people need to be aware of the impact of what it is that they're doing and there are things it can be done, just as we're talking about in terms of air quality and things like that, they want to shut everything down.

It's this kind of absolutism that we see over and over again when the bureaucracies and regulators get involved. It's the same type of thing that has been shutting down in many areas and the types of cars that people are allowed to have. You can't have a car that's got any kind of emission. So even if the car is predominantly an electric vehicle, if it's a hybrid or if it's one of these, what they call now an extended range. range electric vehicle where you've got a small generator there that's going to charge the batteries

and give you a very extended long range, you're not allowed to have that in many areas because they've got to have absolute zero emissions. And when you look at that kind of absolutism, it always leads to a tyranny, doesn't it? Yes. And I think, you know, the example of the landowner group who dug a pond, I think that kind of thing is handled much better at the state and county level. In the east, there's lots of water. And as you, the further west you go, it starts to get dry. And the western states have very well-established state water law that controls water rights. And if you have a water right that's superior to someone else, then you have the first right to use the water. And so I think that it's been worked out quite well in most states, most of the Western

States, and I think it works, it works pretty well. There's, there are disputes, but it's settled law, and now we have the federal government that has come in with the Clean Water Act and has really done a lot of damage to settled law in the West, and it's, and through the Endangered Species Act as well. So I think, you know, the federal overreach is a problem, mostly of regulation, people think of, oh, the taxes are too high. But it's actually a lot easier to control taxes than it is to control the growth of regulation. And I think this is the big battle we're in. It's the debt we can't control taxes.

That's no problem. Yeah, I'll cut your taxes. Spending. No, spending is very hard to control, yes. That's right. Yeah. And when we look at this, of course, what you're saying is very true. these things are better addressed at the local level.

And that was really what our Constitution was about, what the 10th Amendment was about. That there were very few things that were going to be done by the federal government. Now the federal government has to have approval and involvement in every single aspect of our life. And it's that kind of a mind frame that needs to be adjusted because they don't have really the authority to do most of these things we're talking about. Even the environmental stuff that is there, that's not really something that belongs to the federal government. that's something that is really best resolved at the local level. You know, when people look at what the agenda is for many people on the left,

they want to have federal zoning laws to control what you can do with your property. They want to put everything at the central and highest level and not do anything locally. And so I think there's going to have to be really, when we look at this, we can fight these battles one by one or we can look at it and we can say, here's the foundational problem, and that is throwing out the 10th Amendment. So the federal government has to have a say and has to grant permission to do anything and everything in our lives. And everything is basically forbidden unless they permit it at the federal level.

That is exactly wrong. That's an inversion of the 10th Amendment. And I think that's really one of the key things. What do you see in terms of that type of action? Is there any awareness of that in terms of people pushing back against this? federal overreach? In general, I think that the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, has undertaken the biggest deregulatory, has the biggest deregulatory agenda since regulations

really started to get going 110 to 15 years ago. And so they're very ambitious. and I think if you look at a lot of what they're doing is they're trying to shrink the federal footprint. They're trying to shrink the federal claims of authority over things. And unfortunately, a lot of this is in law, and so they can only take it so far unless Congress will reform some of these laws. and I, you know. I agree. Yeah, there's just been this, the sea change in my lifetime.

It used to be we'd laugh about it. We'd say, hey, don't make a federal case out of it. Well, everything is a federal case, right? Okay, everything. Yeah, that's right. And so it has to be a, there has to be an awareness of the general public that everything should not be a federal case, that there are many things that are better and really can only be handled at the state and local level.

And even under the Constitution, regardless of what laws. they pass. There has to be an understanding that there was a reason that they did it that way in the Constitution. And by the way, the Constitution is governing over these laws. And so is that an approach that it's being taken? Are they really challenging the constitutionality of some of these laws? Are they just changing the laws at this point in time? Because I think that's what's really going to make it a problem when the Democrats come in or somebody who wants to start to regulate this stuff. If we leave the idea there that the federal government has the right or the duty or the power to do these types of things, then it's going to see-saw bank and forth being the Republicans, Democrats, all the time,

unless we can get back to a clear understanding of federalism and the idea that power is get granted to the government by the states, which is really what the Constitution says historically what happened. And now the servant has become the master. Yes, that's right. I think, you know, Congress isn't passing major reforms of our regulatory laws. That's right. And the Trump administration is trying to do what are called administrative rulemakings. That is, you go through a process that takes several years, and you change the rules that implement the law. And these rules can be undone by a future administration by going through the same process. But it does take several years, and it is subject to public comment, and it is subject to litigation.

So if we can't change the laws, the best thing we can do is to reform the rules under which these laws are administered. And the Trump administration is trying to do that in a lot of places. And then one place where they're not doing enough is on federal lands, which is, you know, one quarter of the country is federal land, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Parks. Wow. That's a problem in and of itself, isn't it? Yeah, that's a huge problem. And I don't think the Trump administration is doing enough on reforming our federal lands regulations. But they, well, to be fair, they're doing quite a bit.

But there's a problem, which is that the White House, the president, doesn't really understand that the federal lands are a problem. So it comes up against his, he and his two hunting sons, sons who hunt, they are very keen on federal lands and so they want to keep them. And I think we should be getting rid of transferring them to the states and getting, improving the environmental management of those lands if the states could get a hold of them and get rid of the federal land mismanagement that is, you know, burning down our forests, as you mentioned. But the other thing is that there have been several good Supreme Court decisions on these issues, on regulatory issues.

One was called Loper Bright. Another is the seven-county infrastructure coalition. these decisions are shrinking the federal regulatory reach. And I think if we can build on those, if the Trump administration could get more of these cases to the Supreme Court, there could be further progress through the Supreme Court. Yeah, that's true. It's good to have you on to talk about this,

because we all have this antiquated idea. of how things take place, you know, how Bill becomes a law, the old schoolhouse rock thing, you know. I'm a bill, I'm a bill on Capitol Hill. It doesn't work that way, as you pointed out. You have these rules. And it's really the bureaucracies that are ruling us.

They're not elected. They're not accountable. And what's even worse is that they have taken the position and we see this across the board where you're talking about the IRS, where you're talking about the drug war. If they put out a regulation, then if they want to do civil asset for it for,

for example, then you don't have any due process. They don't have to prove that you're guilty of something. You are guilty and have to prove the genocide. And we're all familiar with that through the IRS. But now we've seen that happening with the drug war, many other things, in terms of property rights when it comes to things that have to do with the environment. And if the bureaucracy that has to do with the environment, the EPA gets involved in it, well, guess what?

You don't have any property rights with that either. And so there needs to be an understanding that, you know, just like Nancy Pelosi said, we've got to pass it to find out, wasn't it? You know, you're going to create these massive guidelines or maybe even a whole new department, and then they're going to set all the rules for everything. Congress really doesn't do its job anymore. And so, as you point out, you have this fight within the executive branch,

and that causes us to seesaw back and forth between Republican and Democrat administrations because they're just setting up arbitrary rules. And I think there has to be a fundamental understanding change. in terms of the way the public sees how this is happening to understand the reality of what's going on in Washington, how these missions have creeped out on us to control everything. It's really through the bureaucracy, isn't it? Yes, and you mentioned that Congress doesn't do its job, and I think that's the key problem. Congress passes a law and delegates authority not to the president so much,

but to the agency that is going to administer the law, to the civil servants, the bureaucrat. That's right. And then they never do any oversight. And on the rare occasions, when they do do oversight to figure out whether the agency is administering the law in the way that Congress wanted, and they find out that it isn't. Then they are unable to pass any reforms. They can't actually, once they've enacted a law, they can't, it's proven very hard for Congress to enact reforms of those laws, even when they can't. when they understand that the law isn't working the way it should. Yeah, they'll have hearings, and they'll become local heroes and media figures

complaining about what the problem is, but as you point out, they never reform it. They never change it. And they leave that power in the bureaucracies. And so there really has to be an understanding of the American people about how this system actually operates and how Congress has abdicated their authority over pretty much everything. They've abdicated it to either the bureaucracy or to the executive branch, and they really don't do anything except provide us with a circus to talk about, I guess. Yes, that's right. That's right.

And, you know, we need, you know, the answer is to have better legislators to elect better people. But as you know, you can't really tell the way our system works. It's hard to tell who's better and who's worse. and then once they get into office, they often, many of them quickly become part of the problem, not part of the solution. Yeah, they go native. Yeah.

Yes. And then if you got somebody who really does stand up to the system, you'll have the system will purge them out because the system is set up to have legislators who are malleable. They understand that's why they don't do anything. They know that if they make any waves, they're going to get taken out. And so you don't stand up against anything, the spending or anything else. you just kind of quietly go along and you'll be fine and there's a nice pension involved is there

well it truly is amazing thank you so much for trying to do something to fix this and again I think it's really key for people to understand how this system works the the awesome power that has been given has been abdicated by Congress to the regulatory agencies and one example of that is the CPA veto that you're talking about and again people can find out about this at fix the EPA veto.org. Thank you so much for joining us, my heart. I appreciate that. Thanks for having me, David.

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