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The Department of Energy also announced a slate of appointees to senior leadership positions. Avi Zevin, formerly a senior attorney and affiliated scholar at the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, was appointed deputy general counsel for energy policy.

Now up for review is the 2019 rule repealing and replacing Obama’s flagship Clean Power Plan for existing power plants. This week's decision by a federal court to throw out the Trump rule greases the skids by allowing EPA to return to the drawing board to decide how power plants should be regulated. “The rule that the Biden administration will write will be written against the backdrop of some prediction of not just what the D.C. Circuit would do, of which we now have a fairly good sense, but also what the Supreme Court could do, which we don’t know,” said Richard Revesz.

Avi Zevin will be deputy general counsel for energy policy. He is an attorney with experience advancing electricity policies. He was a senior attorney and affiliated scholar at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and an attorney at Van Ness Feldman LLP.

As former Interior Department official David Hayes heads for the Biden administration, the group he has helmed for four years is getting a new set of leaders. Bethany Davis Noll will serve as executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at the NYU School of Law, which has promoted actions by state attorneys general to fight the Trump administration's environmental rollbacks. Jessica Bell will be the center's deputy director, stepping in to replace Elizabeth Klein.

“It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, who was on Mr. Biden’s short list to run the E.P.A. “No one doubts the EPA’s authority to put these regulations on auto pollution back in place,” Mr. Revesz said. “But they can’t just make the Trump rules go away by executive order."

President Biden issued a sweeping executive order Wednesday to review former President Trump's environmental rollbacks across the federal government. "It is an unusually long list of regulations to be reviewed," said Richard Revesz, whose name has been floated as a potential White House regulatory chief. "The reason for the unusual length of this list is that no prior administration has ever taken so many actions that do so much harm to the health of the American people and the environment."

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school, a non-partisan group, said EPA’s legal theory has been “unsupportable” and called the erstwhile ACE regulation the Trump administration’s top environmental policy.

“It’s fitting that, on the Trump administration’s last day in office, the D.C. Circuit forcefully struck down the signature item of its environmental agenda,’’ said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

Richard Revesz, director of New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration devised "an unsupportable legal theory" to justify the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.

The decision Tuesday caps the administration’s poor record fighting for its deregulatory attempts in court. According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, the administration has lost more than 80 percent of its legal attempts to undo or force agency regulations in its favor. “The EPA constructed an unsupportable legal theory to justify the Clean Power Plan,” said Richard Revesz, director of the institute.