More basic issues holding up the regulations point to another problem: the skeleton crew of inexperienced political appointees who are heading the drafting process may not be up to a job that would usually be handled by career federal workers with decades of expertise.
The draft rule lacks two technical documents that experts say would be essential to defending it in court. By law, any major new policy affecting the environment requires an environmental-impact statement, but no such document has been completed or sent to the White House, according to people who have viewed the draft.
Those people say the draft rule also lacks what is known as a regulatory impact analysis, which is supposed to describe at length the legal, scientific, health and economic impacts of a major new rule.
It typically takes many months to complete — the analysis accompanying the original Obama rule ran to 1,217 pages and included supporting analyses by the National Academies of Science. But as of last month, that document was in bare-bones draft form at best, according to a person familiar with the matter.
