When President Donald Trump took the podium at the White House on a hot day in July, he said American jobs have been crushed by "a merciless avalanche of wasteful and expensive and intrusive federal regulation."
And he said that his administration has been "cutting regulations like nobody has ever seen before."
On one point, Indiana environmental policy experts agree.
"I've been studying this issue now for about 25 years," said Leigh Raymond, a political science professor at Purdue University who focuses on environmental policy. "We have definitely never seen anything like what's happened in the last four years. This is truly unprecedented."
"Pollutants that come from coal plants are experienced here in the Midwest," said Janet McCabe, director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University, and a former EPA official in the department of air quality. "So anything that affects coal plants is going to have a significant impact on the Midwest, likely more than compared to other parts of the country."
