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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.

"For four years, the Trump administration has propagated the outright lie that the Clean Power Plan relied on regulatory techniques never used before, and the EPA constructed an unsupportable legal theory to justify its repeal," said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's School of Law.

"It’s fitting that, on the Trump administration’s last full day in office, the D.C. Circuit forcefully struck down the signature item of its environmental agenda, which has brought enormous harm to the health of the American people, to the environment, and to the competitiveness of our economy," said Ricky Revesz, director of the NYU School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, which opposed the ACE rule.

The federal auto regulator said this week it would delay an increase in fines imposed on manufacturers that fail to meet emissions standards designed to curb global warming, even after the Trump administration has lost two lawsuits over the issue. Richard Revesz, a law professor at New York University, said the agency’s action was “directly inconsistent” with a ruling last year by a federal appeals court in New York. “In an administration that has taken many outrageous actions to compromise the health of the American people and the environment, this one stands out as an example of rampant lawlessness,” said Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, which was involved in the litigation.

Eight days before President Donald Trump leaves office, the EPA published a rule on 13 January that sets 3% of total gross US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the significant threshold at which the agency can regulate releases of these pollutants. Below that level, the EPA said no endangerment of public health would ensue. "The final rule violates the APA because it isn't a logical outgrowth of EPA's 2018 proposal and the public didn't get a meaningful opportunity to comment on the 3% threshold for significance," Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, said.

In a surprise move yesterday, the EPA posted a final rule that does nothing to change Obama-era carbon regulations on new power plants. Instead it doubles down on an issue that was raised only in a footnote in the December 2018 proposal: whether EPA should create a new metric for which industrial sectors contribute to climate change enough to trigger regulation. Environmental lawyers predicted that the Biden EPA would have little difficulty dispensing with it. "I think there's very little practical effect," said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. "It's a banana peel, and the Biden administration is very unlikely to slip on it, I trust."

Four years ago, President Trump launched his deregulatory push with gusto. So far, the Trump administration has lost 83% of legal challenges to its regulations, guidance and agency memorandums, according to statistics compiled by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law. "It's pretty shoddy," said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for the NYU institute. "There are all these cases they lost at the beginning, and then only this year have we seen the big rollbacks. Since Trump didn't win reelection, the administration isn't going to be able to defend those in court."

The Trump administration lost a mountain of critical cases and failed to get most of its top priorities across the legal finish line. “The biggest rules are still being litigated, and that doesn’t help solidify a legacy for this administration,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director for New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

The impending power shift in the Senate means Congress will once again turn to the Congressional Review Act to scrap a bevy of regulations. Hill Republicans and President Trump used the CRA to kill 16 Obama-era rules in 2017. Democrats, in contrast, have never deployed the CRA. "It's the quickest way to get rid of policies that will cause significant harms to the health of Americans and to the quality of our environment," said Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been mentioned as a possible Biden regulatory chief.