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Obama's regulation meant roads, buildings and other infrastructure needed to be constructed to take climate change into account and be built to withstand the effects of such climate change, including rising sea levels in coastal areas.
Speaking from New York when he announced the rule rollback August 15, Trump said, "We're going to get infrastructure built quickly, inexpensively, relatively speaking, and the permitting process will go very, very quickly."
Trump's decision to roll back the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard was praised by business groups, including the National Association of Home Builders, which said flood regulations had pushed up the cost of housing. But the decision was criticized by environmental groups, Reuters reports.
Rafael Lemaitre, former director of public affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the news service that Trump was undoing "the most significant action taken in a generation" to protect infrastructure from climate change.
"Eliminating this requirement is self-defeating. We can either build smarter now or put taxpayers on the hook to pay exponentially more when it floods. And it will," he added.
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