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The Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.

Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, weighed in on the lawsuit. “Maryland is not asking for much here,” he said. “It doesn’t expect coal plants in surrounding states to install expensive new pollution controls. The plants already have the technology they need. Maryland just wants them to start using that equipment more often, especially during the summer.”

A group of U.S. state attorneys general say they are now acting as one of the primary checks on efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to weaken environmental protections and back away from action on climate change. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the state officials are now the core of the “legal resistance” to efforts by the U.S. government to overturn environmental protections.

“There is a real need for the people who live nearby, and for the people who are responding to these accidents, to know what they are going to encounter when they put out the fire, or when people nearby are trying to protect their families,” Noll said. “So now to turn around and cancel those protections — EPA clearly did not think this through, and that is a real danger to public health.”

President Trump is undermining efforts to improve air quality for Americans. His administration has attempted to delay the implementation of new ozone standards adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2015, and it is seeking cuts to the EPA’s budget that would severely compromise the agency’s ability to enforce all air quality standards. For Latinos, the Trump administration is compounding the problem even more, through its efforts to roll back healthcare and its aggressive deportation policies.

A Spanish-language version of this op-ed was published by Univision.

State experimentation may be the only way to break the gridlock on environmental issues that now overwhelms our national political institutions. However, without a broad mandate from the federal government to address urgent environmental problems, few red and purple states will follow California’s lead. In my view, giving too much power to the states will likely result in many states doing less, not more.

“Pruitt’s willingness to play fast and loose has helped his anti-regulatory reputation soar,” Davis Noll and Revesz write in Slate. “But the brazen deficiencies in the agency’s work exposing the hollowness of Pruitt’s ‘rule of law’ rhetoric should give Pruitt’s supporters pause. Once the judicial challenges run their course, Pruitt may be striking out a lot more.”

Pruitt claims that his regulatory rollbacks represent a return to the “rule of law,” but he has pursued them in a lawless fashion, cutting corners and ignoring fundamental legal requirements. Now, failing to follow the rules of the game is catching up with him.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last week said he would seek to bolster the agency’s lagging Superfund program, after the release of a report recommending ways to expedite the cleanup of the nation’s most egregious toxic waste sites. “The proposed EPA budget would significantly reduce the amount for enforcement, and without enforcement it might be harder to get companies responsible for the pollution to participate in cleanups and pay remediation costs,” Richard Revesz said.

Maryland and Connecticut have filed formal notices with the EPA that they intend to sue the agency for not responding to petitions they filed asking the EPA to force power plants in upwind states to curb their air pollution. “The agency has an obligation to act,” said Richard Revesz, director of New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, a regulatory think tank.