In the News

Jayni Hein, a former law professor at the New York University School of Law and natural resources director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, has become the council’s senior director for the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. Part of her role will be to steer a path through the sweeping changes the Trump administration made to NEPA—or possibly to quarterback a rewrite of them.

Jayni Hein will serve as Counsel and Senior Director for the National Environmental Policy Act. She was most recently the natural resources director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law. 

This research might have been prevented from informing public health policy but for a federal court in Montana, which last week vacated a rule written by the EPA under former President Donald Trump that barred scientific research based on standard, anonymized health data from consideration in its work. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to rely on this important study is significantly enhanced as a result,” said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, of the court case.

Experts at the New York University Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity agreed that the ‘censored science’ rule would have seriously constricted the EPA from considering important scientific evidence in a wide range of environmental rulemakings. In a statement, Richard Revesz, who directs the NYU institute, described the rule as ‘one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy’.

"The 'censored science' rule was one of the Trump administration's most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy," Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. "Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched."

Failures to defend its last-minute rules mirror the Trump administration’s poor overall record defending its deregulatory attempts in court. One analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University found the administration lost more than 80% of its legal attempts to undo regulations or write new rules.

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”

Sens. Ed Markey and Tammy Duckworth and Rep. Cori Bush, flanked by leading environmental justice advocates, unveiled legislation on Thursday that would create an interagency task force to map environmental justice communities "based on cumulative impacts." The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law released its own report on improving environmental justice mapping.

It could take years for Mr. Biden to restore and strengthen all the Obama-era emissions regulations that his predecessor rolled back, my colleague Coral Davenport reports. That’s because the Trump administration almost never eliminated those regulations entirely; rather, it replaced them with new, weaker pollution regulations that Mr. Biden in turn must replace. “It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, told Ms. Davenport. “They may not get to some of these until the end of a first term.”

Customers were at the center of a panel discussion last week, hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity and the Environmental Defense Fund, that highlighted what can happen when new state climate laws conflict with those currently governing fossil fuels. The discussion stemmed from research by Justin Gundlach and Elizabeth Stein, which casts light on policies under New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) that are inconsistent with other state polices that support residential customer access to natural gas.