After the Lac-Megantic crash, which had only one crew member on the train, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed a rule to require two-person crews on all trains. The Trump administration withdrew the proposal in 2019, saying “no direct conclusions could be drawn about train crew staffing’s safety impact” on Lac-Megantic or other accidents. The Biden administration has said it will seek to revive the rule.

Relevance to derailment: None. The 149-car train that derailed had two crew members plus a trainee on board.

There’s more but you can click here to read the whole thing. The bottom line, as the headline makes clear is “So far, Trump’s rollback of regulations can’t be blamed for Ohio train wreck.” The “so far” is there because the investigation isn’t over but also I suspect because the left is out over its skis on this one and people aren’t going to like this fact check.

Update: I should mention that PolitiFact did it’s usual bass-ackward job on this. They fact-checked the claim by Occupy Democrats that regulations were rolled back under Trump and found that to be “Mostly True.“

“Obama imposed stricter rules on trains carrying toxins. Trump killed them,” claimed a Feb. 15 Facebook post from Occupy Democrats, a liberal advocacy group. The post includes an image from the aftermath of the train derailment in Ohio.

The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

An Occupy Democrats spokesperson told PolitiFact this post was referring to changes to a rule about braking systems for high-hazard flammable unit trains.

PolitiFact looked into this rule change and found the claim to be largely accurate.

However, PolitFact also admitted that there’s no evidence those regulations would have mattered in this accident:

However, even if this safety rule had still been in effect, it would not have applied to the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine, because it was not categorized as a high-hazard cargo train.

Although the Norfolk Southern train contained hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride, it did not meet the Department of Transportation’s narrow definition of a high-hazard flammable unit train in that it didn’t have at least 70 cars containing flammable materials, such as crude oil or ethanol. The chemicals it was carrying fall into a different classification not included in this definition.

The National Transportation Safety Board told PolitiFact that the Norfolk Southern train was categorized as a “general merchandise” train and it used “pneumatic brakes,” or conventional air brakes.

So PolitiFact has managed to side with Occupy Democrats despite the obviously bogus implication made by the group that the regulatory rollback and the derailment were connected.