Why state and local politics matter now more than ever

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Trump administration has vowed to roll back all sorts of federal regulations, from workplace safety standards to environmental protections. State and local governments have faced pressure from the White House to comply with this agenda. And it’s turned them into even more important battlegrounds in the regulatory wars. On the show today, Liane Jollon, executive director of Western Leaders Network, explains how local officials grapple with threats of funding cuts coming from the White House, and how you can get more involved in your state and local politics.

Later, listeners share some love for public libraries. And, Steve Pierson, co-host of “The Practivist Pod,” answers the Make Me Smart question.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"States Ramping Up Regulations Amid Federal Pullback" from Forbes
"Trump administration moves to repeal climate ‘holy grail’" from Politico
"Texas House issues arrest warrants for Democrats who left state to block congressional redistricting" from The Texas Tribune
"Donald Trump wants states and cities to do as they are told" from The Economist
"The Documenters Network" from City Bureau

We love hearing from you. Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or email [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:08.5	Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.
0:12.5	And I'm Samantha Fields. It is Tuesday, August 5th.
0:16.1	One of the hallmarks of this second Trump administration is its efforts to roll back all sorts of federal
0:22.0	regulations on everything, workplace safety standards, consumer protections, the environment. Just
0:28.3	last week, the administration proposed repealing the EPA's endangerment finding, which is what
0:33.6	determined that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health. It's also what gives
0:37.7	the EPA the power to regulate fossil fuels. And that's just one example. All of this means
0:44.2	that the regulating and the lawmaking happening at state and local levels is going to matter a lot
0:51.6	more in this new reality. So here to make us smart about this is Leanne Jelon,
0:57.5	who is executive director of the Western Leaders Network, which is an association that supports
1:03.2	local, state, and tribal leaders across the interior west. So welcome to the show, Leanne.
1:10.2	Thank you, Kimberly. It's great to be here and great
1:12.5	to get to talk to you guys. The Trump administration is really pulling back from all sorts of
1:17.8	regulations, even issuing an executive order saying that for every new regulation issued,
1:22.7	10 have to be rolled back. How do you see this being felt in communities across the country already,
1:29.2	and how do you expect this to continue to play out?
1:32.6	Well, the Western Leaders Network was founded in 2017 by a county commissioner in the southwest corner
1:42.2	of Colorado, and it was exactly in response to this,
1:47.8	which is that the first Trump administration had discussed embracing significant regulatory
1:57.2	rollbacks. And these regulatory rollbacks were, you know, believed to really imperil public
2:05.3	health in the environment. So what we are seeing in the second Trump administration is even more of
	...

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