[politico]138 things Trump did this year while you weren't looking

Interesting toilet read. List is too long to copy pasta. I think this and the 97 bills congress actually passed (good news for those who want to reform the VA system) deserves more attention for obvious reasons. Maybe we'll see a realignment on trustworthy news publications that don't blindly sink their teeth into low grade, attention seeking chum.

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/12/29/138-trump-policy-changes-2017-000603

Behind the crazy headlines, more conservative priorities got pushed through than most people realize. An exhaustive list of what really happened to the government in 2017.

In Donald Trump’s first act as president, he signed a high-profile executive order intended to dismantle Obamacare, instructing federal agencies to take any measures they could to roll back the Affordable Care Act. In retrospect, the vaguely worded directive was only symbolic. The Trump administration did eventually make moves to obstruct the law, but they took months and another executive order to implement. For all the theater, it’s hard to say whether that order had any effect at all.

Less noticed on Inauguration Day was a surprise move by the Federal Housing Administration to scratch a planned reduction in mortgage insurance premiums. That change helped shore up the financial health of the FHA’s mortgage insurance fund—but came at a real cost to homeowners, who would have saved an average of $500 a year if the Obama-era plan had stayed in place.

If you didn’t hear about the $500 you may have lost that day—well, that’s how the year went. The attention gap between the empty executive order and the real-life mortgage insurance rollback turned out to be representative of the whole first year of the Trump administration.

Again and again, Trump has taken the stage to an adoring crowd and declared victory on some issue, or announced lavish new promises, without any real results or plans to back them up. Meanwhile, very steadily, and almost totally separately from Trump’s speeches and tweetstorms, his administration has been ushering in a new conservative era of government—taking specific aim at Obama-era rules, and broader aim at the big regulatory mission of government.

At The Agenda, we’ve been tracking these policy changes weekly since June, ignoring the noise and explaining what the Trump administration actuallyaccomplished each week. This week, we’re pulling them all into one mega-list—a portrait of a quiet but very serious Republican push against the scope and ambition of government.

What does it look like? There are a few consistent themes: Rolling back President Barack Obama’s legacy on everything from labor regulations to environmental protections, and more broadly tearing down rules across the government. Some topics have been largely missing: his infrastructure push has gone nowhere. Many of the rules are still in progress, or being delayed so long that it’s anyone’s guess what will really happen. (As you’ll see, some of our items are recurring episodes in long-running dramas, like what will finally happen to Obama’s fiduciary standard, which required stockbrokers to act in the best interest of their clients.) And finally, there are some perplexing surprises. After all the rhetoric against China and Mexico, the year’s big trade-war enemy has been … Canada?

Welcome to the annual wrap-up of our weekly guide to what Trump did while you weren’t looking.​