Shredder is overheating in Bush's final months

Generally speaking, it is a very bad idea to enlist hungry foxes to guard the chickens, since they rarely have the birds' best interests at heart. In the waning days of this White House, doing so is called "streamlining," presumably because it gets food into the foxes faster.

The administration is hard at work in its last months gutting decades of environmental and wildlife regulation. That the moves defy both the legislative and judicial branches of the government is just a bonus.

According to the draft regulations, obtained by the Associated Press, the White House intends to allow federal agencies to skip an independent review designed to determine whether a project threatens animals or wildlife. Instead, the agencies would do the assessments themselves.

The whole reason that agencies were required to submit to such tests was because they weren't able to see beyond their own narrow interests - in building a dam, in locating a military base, in expanding a highway - to the larger public interest in protecting species.

The regulations, which don't require congressional approval, would amount to the biggest changes in endangered species law in decades.

The new rules would also forbid the federal government from considering the greenhouse gas emissions of a project in determining the effects on threatened species. That's nothing more than a backdoor attempt to circumvent the administration's own conclusion that global warming is killing polar bears.

The Endangered Species Act isn't the only environmental regulation the administration seems determined to leave in tatters.

According to Pilot writer Catherine Kozak, the National Marine Fisheries Service has proposed replacing environmental impact analyses and shortening public comment periods when developing or changing rules for fisheries management. The goal is to shut citizens out, or at least to mute their voices.

"They're throwing out 40 years of case law," said Sera Harold Drevenak, South Atlantic representative with the Marine Fish Conservation Network. "I don't see how it's making anything any simpler. To start over from scratch is ridiculous."

Or sublime, depending on your perspective.

Nobody advocates unnecessary regulation that masks a political agenda. But the administration seems bent on doing away with environmental regulation simply because it doesn't like the result, or the interpretation by regulators, Congress or the courts.

For eight years now, there have been plenty of hints that the Bush administration had no qualms about entrusting foxes with keys to the White House, as when the vice president encouraged oil companies to craft the nation's energy policy, or when politicians were encouraged to use the Justice Department to settle scores.

The effect of the White House push on the environment is likely to be measured largely by the time opponents will waste fighting them.

The resulting uncertainty will also paralyze precisely the projects the revisions were designed to speed, because whoever is elected next to guard the nation's henhouse will almost certainly change the rules yet again.