In the News

When EPA moved to lock in a national rollback of long-standing hazardous pollutant requirements last year, officials saw no need to study the effects on environmental justice communities despite a 1994 executive order requiring agencies to assess environmental justice concerns. At the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank based at New York University School of Law that opposes the policy's repeal, Jack Lienke noted that the executive order is not legally enforceable. But in light of a 2015 Supreme Court decision saying agencies had to incorporate cost considerations into their rulemakings, EPA's move could be vulnerable on the grounds that the agency ignored the possible costs associated with the health damage accompanying higher levels of toxic emissions, said Lienke, the institute's regulatory policy director.

Environmental and public interest groups are using meetings with White House Office of Management & Budget and EPA officials to reiterate their push for the agency to tighten its pending revisions to the lead and copper drinking water rule, including seeking quicker replacement of lead pipes and a new analysis of the rule’s benefits. The environmental group Clean Water Action met with OMB and EPA officials Sept. 4, and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity non-partisan think tank met with the officials Aug. 28.

The Natural Resources Defense Council noted, “Nothing in NEPA gives the president the authority to side-step the environmental review and public participation the statute requires.” New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity added that any exemptions allowed are for “true emergencies” that threaten lives and that it is “an enormous stretch to claim the economic crisis from COVID-19 fits.”

In some cases, Trump administration efforts are hitting delays and possibly brick walls. The Administrative Procedure Act requires that a new rule must have a “reasoned explanation” for it to be sound – or withstand a lawsuit, says Bethany Davis Noll of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. If some Trump moves leave a lasting mark, in other cases the president’s actions could face reversals – notably in cases where his policies lack strong economic or scientific footing. “I think most presidents want some kind of legacy,” Davis Noll says, and in her view “that’s what he hasn’t managed to accomplish.”

The D.C. Circuit is expected to hear oral arguments in challenges to major replacement rules sometime in the fall. Decisions in all three high-profile legal battles could come after Biden potentially takes the oath of office. "These are complicated cases and it typically takes the D.C. Circuit at least six months to decide them, so they're probably pending when the new administration comes into office," Richard Revesz, director of New York University Law School's Institute for Policy Integrity, said. A new Biden administration would likely ask the D.C. Circuit to put the suits on hold on the grounds that the new president wants to review and modify the rules, Revesz said, noting that Trump did the same thing with the Clean Power Plan shortly after being sworn into office in 2017.

To date, challenges to Trump’s deregulatory actions have been very successful. The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law found that the Trump administration has lost 87% of challenges to its regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda.

Messages, made public in a lawsuit, suggest the E.P.A. rescinded a requirement on methane at the behest of an executive just weeks after President Trump took office. Just last week, a federal court, restoring an Obama-era regulation, struck down a Bureau of Land Management effort to weaken restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public lands. In that case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that the Trump administration, in its “haste” and “zeal,” failed to properly justify its rollback. “In the early days they did very little justification,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, the university’s nonpartisan think tank. “They justify their policies on analytically flimsy or sometimes nonexistent grounds, thinking, I guess, that they will get away with it,” Mr. Revesz said. “But time and again, the courts say no.”

The Trump administration’s relentless push to gut dozens of environmental and public health safeguards worsened the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, a new report from New York University School of Law found. The lengthy analysis, which NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity published Tuesday, comes as President Donald Trump and his team act as if the coronavirus threat is waning — when the U.S. outbreak stands out as one of the worst in the world — and as they work to finalize a frenzy of environmental rollbacks ahead of November’s election.

New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity says the Trump administration has succeeded on only 11 of 99 legal challenges to its regulatory changes, with more than half its losses on environmental policy. Bethany Davis Noll, who manages the scorecard, said success rates in previous administrations hovered around 70%.

Jayni Hein of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University says the final rule -- published in the July 16 Federal Register after President Donald Trump personally unveiled it a day prior -- makes it seem like NEPA is “all about efficiently approving projects. There is a lot of new language that goes to efficiency and time limits and page limits, and the new regulation erases a lot of the discussion of the need for a careful analysis of environmental effects.”