NEWSWEEK.COM 33
ELECTION 2020administration could move quickly to grant leases.
“It’s possible that between now and January, that you
could see a huge effort ramped up to logging at Ton-
gass, and that you can’t reverse,” says Tim Donaghy, a
senior research specialist with Greenpeace.
Conservatives have their own concerns. Wood, of
the Heritage Foundation, is concerned about Trump’s
comments in the last month of the campaign about
wanting a large COVID-19 relief package. “What con-
servatives want the president to do is not spend more
money,” Wood says. “We want to see spending reined
in. We want the president to work with conservatives
in Congress to ensure this doesn’t turn into a spend-
ing train on the way out of office. That’s not a way
to enshrine your legacy among conservatives who’ve
been real champions of his presidency.”whatever vacancies are open that the Senate can
continue to fill, they should absolutely do that,” says
Genevieve Wood, senior policy adviser for the con-
servative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. “You
know, they’re getting paid to the end of the year, so
they should continue to do their jobs.”
Immigration-reform advocates are also con-
cerned that Trump, whose political rise was powered
by a hard line on the issue, could order widespread
Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to “get
rid of as many people as they can,” says Sirine She-
baya, executive director of the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyers Guild. “Once they
have a hold on someone, it’s very hard to get them
to unhold, even if there wasn’t a good reason for en-
forcement against that person in the first place. Sosome of these things will potentially have ramifica-
tions even [when] Biden comes in.”
Several major progressive groups also fear that
Trump could rush through new agency rules that
would require Biden to spend months working
through the cumbersome rule-making process—
which requires at least a 30-day period of public
comment—or file lawsuits to prevent the enactment
of Trump efforts. “The more they do in a flurry at
the end of the administration, the harder it will be
to catch everything,” Gilbert says. “Even if the Biden
administration comes in on Day One and says, ‘All
these rules are rescinded,’ it’s still going to take time
to actually undo.”
The list of possible rules is long. The EPA, for
instance, has been planning to enact a regulation
that would bar the agency from considering certain
scientific studies on topics like climate change. The
Department of the Interior has already finalized
rules opening the environmentally vulnerable Arc-
tic Wildlife Refuge to oil extraction and Tongass
National Forest in Alaska to logging, so the Trump“The more they do in a FLURRY AT THE END
of the administration, the harder it
will be to catch everything.”
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