Claim: The Obama administration left Trump with a “stockpile with a cupboard that was bare.”
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: lose protections under the rule change. "The New York Times" found in November 2018 that the administration had "presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance," relative to the Obama administration. In the first six weeks of his tenure, Trump suspended — or in a few cases, revoked — over 90 regulations. In January 2017, Trump ordered a temporary government-wide hiring freeze of the civilian work force (excluding staff in the military, national security, public safety and offices of new presidential appointees). In February 2017, said he did not intend to fill

title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: many of the governmental positions that were still vacant, as he considered them unnecessary; there were nearly 2,000 vacant government positions. The hiring freeze was lifted in April 2017. In early 2017, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to slash two existing regulations for every new one (without spending on regulations going up). A September 2017 Bloomberg BNA review found that due to unclear wording in the order and the large proportion of regulations that it exempts, the order had had little effect since it was signed. The Trump OMB released an analysis in February 2018 indicating that

title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: administration stopped the Obama administration policy of logging visitors to the White House, making it difficult to tell who has visited the White House. Nathan Cortez of the Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law, who studies the handling of public data, said that the Trump administration, unlike the Obama administration, was taking transparency "in the opposite direction". According to several reports, Trump's and his family's trips in the first month of his presidency cost the US taxpayers nearly as much as former President Obama's travel expenses for an entire year. When Obama was president, Trump frequently criticized him for

title: Foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration
text: keep it out of the hands of ISIS. Trump reiterated his support for seizing other nations' oil after taking office as President. In January 2017, he said that the United States "should have kept the oil" after the Iraq invasion and "maybe we'll have another chance". With the arrival of the Donald Trump administration, a change in policy was instituted regarding the disclosure of current troop levels as well as the timing of any additional deployments to the area, thus making good on his campaign promises to utilize the "element of surprise." As of April 2017, according to the LA

title: Foreign policy of Donald Trump (2015-2016)
text: spoken and I disagree." On February 16, 2017, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, declared that the United States was not currently prepared to collaborate with Russia on military matters - including future anti-ISIL US operations. The Trump administration has taken a different stance from the previous Obama administration on the issue of the Syrian Civil War, with UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson both stating in March 2017 that the United States would no longer prioritize the removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from office, in line with Trump's stance during his campaign. During

title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: pro-Trump program the president is known to regularly watch — sharply criticized Trump's decision as "totally irresponsible," adding "nobody thinks ISIS is defeated" and that the president had blindsided the Pentagon and State Department. Trump took office after Barack Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA or "Iran nuclear deal"), which Trump described as one of the "worst deals ever made". On February 3, Trump and the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, "sparred on Twitter" over sanctions and Executive Order 13796. Trump tweeted that Iran was "playing with fire" after the country conducted a ballistic missile test earlier

title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: Obama administration. Trump said that he would reimpose the economic sanctions on Iran that were lifted in 2015 as part of the agreement. In response, Iran announced that it would restart uranium enrichment. Trump had long expressed hostility towards the agreement and had on several previous occasions been persuaded by White House aides not to withdraw. However, by May 2018, Trump faced less internal resistance, as more hawkish advisors, such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, had come to play a more prominent role in the administration. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu but widely condemned by

title: Donald Trump
text: second overall. During his first six weeks in office, he abolished ninety federal regulations. On January 23, 2017, Trump ordered a temporary government-wide hiring freeze, except for those working in certain areas. The Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office told a House committee that hiring freezes have not proven to be effective in reducing costs. Unlike some past freezes, the current freeze bars agencies from adding contractors to make up for employees leaving. A week later Trump signed Executive Order 13771, which directed administrative agencies to repeal two existing regulations for every new regulation they issue. Agency defenders expressed

title: Rick Dearborn
text: with vetting, interviewing, and recommending individuals for top cabinet and staff roles in Trump's administration. He was the team's executive director. Dearborn, alongside Marc Short, and Andrew Bremberg, coordinated with aides of Senator Mitch McConnell in employing the Congressional Review Act to reverse 13 regulations made late in the presidency of Barack Obama by creating an Excel spreadsheet of targets, eventually being able to eliminate over twice as many regulations as they had anticipated. On Nov. 11, 2017 The Politico website reported, "Deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn's departure would make him the latest in a growing conga line of

title: Foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration
text: Secretary of Defense James Mattis, declared that the United States was not currently prepared to collaborate with Russia on military matters, including future anti-ISIL US operations. Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News reported in June 2017 that during the early weeks of the Trump administration, State Department employees were told to develop proposals to lift the sanctions which had been imposed on Russia after its military incursions into Ukraine and its interference in the November election. No action or return would be expected from Russia in return for removing the sanctions. The proposals were dropped after resistance from State Department employees

title: Brett H. McGurk
text: stabilization and returning the displaced to their homes. In August 2017, McGurk stated that the Trump administration had "dramatically accelerated" the U.S.–led campaign against ISIL, citing estimates that almost one-third of the territory taken from ISIL "has been won in the last six months." McGurk favorably cited "steps President Trump has taken, including delegating decision–making authority from the White House to commanders in the field." Under the Trump administration, he worked with Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson to develop the accelerated campaign against ISIS, which led to the liberation of Raqqa in October 2017 . He has also visited the battlefields

title: Donald Trump
text: on trade with Cuba and individual visits to the county, undoing the Obama administration's loosening of restrictions. According to an administration official, the new rules were intended to hinder trade with businesses with ties to the Cuban military, intelligence and security services. U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan increased from 8,500 to 14,000, . reversing Trump's pre-election position critical of further involvement in Afghanistan. U.S. officials said then that they aimed to "force the Taliban to negotiate a political settlement"; in January 2018, however, Trump spoke against talks with the Taliban. During the campaign Trump maintained that "Iran is now the

title: Presidential transition of Donald Trump
text: executive departments; neither the Trump nor Clinton campaigns sent representatives to this initial meeting. At about the same time, the White House began transferring its preceding eight years of accumulated electronic files to the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Record Archive for preservation. The transition planning came under heavy criticism for lagging behind other recent transition planning efforts when it was shown to have hired only a "handful" of staff by late July. At that time, Chris Christie named Bill Palatucci, a corporate attorney from New Jersey and the state's Republican National Committeeman, as general counsel; Palatucci reportedly began

title: Environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration
text: to suspend a rule which limited methane emissions from oil and gas wells, a decision which was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Following legal action the Administration also reversed its decision to do away with an Obama-era plan requiring dentists to prevent about five tons of mercury, used in their practice, from getting into the nation's waterways. Environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration The environmental policy of the Donald Trump administration represents a shift from the policy priorities and goals of his predecessor, Barack Obama. While Obama's environmental agenda prioritized

title: Paul Winfree
text: November 2016, he stated that President-elect Trump was highly interested in questions of domestic policy, especially considering the reform of the dozens of federal programs providing aid to low-income people. As part of the Trump administration, Winfree and former Representative OMB Director, Mick Mulvaney, were lead authors of the administration’s budget proposition, calling for major budget cuts in domestic policy programs such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. At the White House, he served as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, the Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, and the Director of Budget Policy. As Chair

title: First 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency
text: U.S. Steel's Mario Longhi, SpaceX's Elon Musk, International Paper's Mark Sutton, and Corning's Wendell Weeks promised to reward the companies who stay in the United States with aggressive cuts on U.S. federal regulations governing their companies by "75 percent or more." On January 31, Trump met with CEOs of pharmaceutical firms, including Novartis's Joseph Jimenez who also represented the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America—the pharmaceutical industry's powerful lobbying group, Merck & Co.'s Kenneth Frazier, Johnson & Johnson, Celgene's Robert Hugin, Eli Lilly, Amgen's Robert Bradway. Trump called for lower prices, "We have no choice. For Medicare, for Medicaid. We

title: First 100 days of Donald Trump's presidency
text: New Hires, to ensure that recipients of federal means-tested programs like Unemployment Insurance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Earned income tax credit (EITC), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are eligible, thereby reducing government waste and increasing accountability. Beginning in January, the Trump administration used the 1996 Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overturn regulations—some of them major—finalized during the final months of Obama's tenure. By April 6, Trump had signed into law 11 resolutions of disapproval under the CRA, after they were passed by the Republican majority in the House and Senate. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can

title: Foreign policy of Donald Trump (2015-2016)
text: policy towards war in Syria and the Middle East. Ann Coulter pointed out that Trump "campaigned on not getting involved in Mideast" and this was one of the reasons many voted for him. In the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting (June 2016), Trump accused the Obama administration that it has actively "supported" the Islamic extremist group that became ISIL, an assertion rated "Pants on Fire" by "PolitiFact" (which quoted experts describing the claim as a "transparently fallacious conspiracy theory") and given "Four Pinocchios" by "The Washington Post" fact-checker (which described it as a "bizarre claim"). In August 2016, Trump

title: Presidency of Donald Trump
text: the economic benefits of regulations significantly outweigh the economic costs. In July 2018, the administration ended the requirement that nonprofits, including political advocacy groups who collect so-called "dark money", disclose the names of large donors to the Internal Revenue Service. Later that year, the Senate voted to overturn the administration's rule change. In February 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era regulation prohibiting gun ownership among the approximately 75,000 individuals who received Social Security checks due to mental illness and who were deemed unfit to handle their financial affairs. In March 2018, Trump instructed the DOJ to ban bump stocks.

title: Presidential transition of Donald Trump
text: presidential administrations, described Trump as "well on his way to building a conservative dream team that has Republicans cheering and liberals in despair." On the other hand, "The Wall Street Journal" stated that "it's nearly impossible to identify a clear ideological bent in the incoming president's" cabinet nominations. "The Washington Post" noted that Trump's cabinet would be "the wealthiest administration in modern American history." The Post also noted that while some of Trump's appointments consisted of "his staunchest and most controversial allies" such as Bannon, Flynn and Sessions, other appointments appealed to the Republican establishment and had "the imprint of