The election's over. In a matter of weeks, Barack Obama will be our next president. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks. But that doesn't mean he's fading away harmlessly.

Oh, no. Just the opposite. Bush is racing the clock to see how much more damage he can do before Jan. 20. In a way, Bush is borrowing a page from Bill Clinton's book – except he's turning it upside down.

Having ignored the environment for much of his eight years in office, Clinton devoted the last months of his presidency to issuing a whole slew – 26,000 pages – of executive orders and regulations that put in place strong, new environmental protections. Bush, by contrast, is using his last months in office to push new rules and regulations that gut environmental and public-safety programs.

High on Bush's list, for example, is a rule published this week by the Environmental Protection Agency (!) allowing mountaintop mining companies to dump their waste alongside or in nearby rivers and streams. Since 1983, mining operations have been banned by law from dumping their massive piles of debris within 100 feet of any stream. The new rule overturns that law.

EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson argued that filling waterways with mountaintops was no big deal, because those streams thus destroyed were not major rivers. Obviously, he's never been to the headwaters of any river, or he would realize that big rivers are formed from the flow of hundreds of just such small streams.

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Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I remember when the job of the EPA was to protect the environment, not destroy it. Indeed, the more fundamental question for Johnson (and Bush) is: Why are we allowing mining companies to cut off the tops of mountains in the first place?

Another "midnight regulation" proposed by Bush would relax protection for workers exposed to toxic substances on the job. The new Bush plan, strongly backed by big business groups, would replace strict national safety standards with industry-by-industry standards – allowing more asbestos in the factory, for example, than in the office.

In this case, Bush is acting in direct defiance of President-elect Barack Obama. In September, Obama and four other senators introduced legislation that would prohibit the Department of Labor from issuing the very rule it is now rushing to complete. Obama also sent a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao urging her to scrap the proposal because it would "create serious obstacles to protecting workers from health hazards on the job." Yet DOL flunkies are proceeding with their plan, even though President Bush himself promised to cooperate with Obama in making the transition "as smooth as possible."

The new mining and worker-safety proposals are only two of some 20 highly controversial rules the Bush administration is rushing to get in place before Jan. 20. Others include: allowing states to charge higher co-payments for hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid; speeding up oil shale development alongside three national parks in the West; exempting family farms from air-pollution regulations; easing restrictions on lead emissions from factories near residential areas; and allowing tourists to carry loaded guns in national parks. The investigative journalist group ProPublica has published the full list of Bush's last-minute regulations on its website: propublica.org.

President Obama, of course, will have the last word. But it won't be easy for him to undo all the damage Bush is doing. A new president can unilaterally reverse executive orders signed by his predecessor, as both Bush and Clinton have done, but rules and regulations, which Bush is pursuing, are different. Once they're embedded in the Code of Federal Regulations, they have the force of law and can only be changed after the new administration goes through a lengthy process of public comment and review.

Knowing that everything he does can eventually be undone, why is George Bush pushing such harmful rules and regulation? Because it completes his destructive agenda and make things as difficult as possible for Barack Obama – as though two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression weren't damage enough.

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