In the News

“The order is extremely vague, and it could easily lead to agency gridlock and regulatory uncertainty,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law.

Appellate Judge Neil Gorsuch has been a vigorous critic of the so-called “Chevron doctrine” that gives federal agencies latitude when interpreting ambiguous laws. “Chevron deference became really important in the later part of the Obama administration because Congress hadn’t acted on a number of environmental issues in a while,” said Denise Grab, a senior attorney with Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

According to Derek Sylvan, strategy director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's School of Law, the executive order "creates a new, irrational way" of evaluating all past and present regulations. "Every regulation will be judged on its costs alone, ignoring the benefits it was designed to create," he says. "If we scrap a regulation that imposes $10 of costs on industry in exchange for $500 of avoided hospital visits, we haven't "saved" society $10; we've thrown away $490. But this order would ignore the $500 in benefits."

President Donald Trump signed an order Monday aimed at cutting regulations on businesses and bankers, saying that agencies should eliminate two regulations for every new one added. Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, said the wording of Trump’s regulations order is likely to cause “confusion and chaos.”

The centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s climate change policy is a 2015 E.P.A. rule curbing greenhouse gas emissions from electric utilities. Mr. Trump has vowed to eliminate the rule, but doing so could require years of court battles. “There are a number of ways this could play out as it goes through the courts, and it could take at least four to five years,” said Richard Revesz. “Ultimately, what happens to it will likely be determined by the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

America’s most progressive state is set to lead the new fight against federal power. Some potential suits are starting to take shape. California’s lieutenant-governor has said that the state could sue under the California Environmental Quality Act or its federal equivalent to quash Mr. Trump’s plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. Richard Revesz, an environmental-policy expert at New York University’s School of Law, says Democratic states could also sue to slow the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

The federal coal program is a quintessential bad deal for Americans. President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to end similar bad deals; his administration shouldn’t discard ongoing reform efforts that could add billions to the federal treasury and energy-producing states.

“If the metric is revised, then the incoming administration would have an obligation to explain why it’s departing from the current approach,” Richard Revesz said. Any changes made without adequate scientific justification would likely be struck down in court.

The new administration almost certainly couldn’t make any major changes without providing adequate scientific and economic justification, said Richard Revesz, a law professor and dean emeritus of the New York University School of Law. Otherwise, the move would also likely be struck down in court as “arbitrary and capricious,” he argued.

Last year, the New York–based Institute for Policy Integrity tried to remedy that situation with just such a large-scale survey of economists who have published work on climate change.