In the News

Looking at three proceedings, completed within weeks of one another, exposes the shameless analytic opportunism of the Trump EPA. The result is a slate of deregulatory actions that put thousands of lives at risk each year, cause serious adverse health impacts on many more, and impose net harms on the American people. A heedless commitment to dangerous deregulation is the only logic that explains its actions.

When the civil servants were directed to undo Obama’s Clean Power Plan and create a more coal-friendly version, some of those who remained at the EPA made sure the documents accompanying the proposed replacement included the fact that increased coal pollution would cause 1,400 new premature deaths a year. The EPA later deleted the number from the final rule, but Richard Revesz, an expert on environmental law at New York University, said it would still play a role in the legal fight against the rollback. “That number was a devastatingly bad conclusion for the administration,” he said.

With an election looming, the urgency of completing regulations is real. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress can overturn a regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized. If Democrats win control of the White House and Senate in November, and keep control of the House, any rule completed after late May or early June would be vulnerable. “The administration understands the electoral map has turned against it,” said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University.

The White House on Thursday will introduce the first major changes to the nation’s benchmark environmental protection law in more than three decades. Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe the changes would hold up in court. In fact, he argued, it is more likely that federal agencies will be sued for inadequate reviews, “thereby leading to far longer delays than if they had done a proper analysis in the first place.”

When the Trump administration finalized its repeal of the Obama-era Clean Water Rule last month, it also quietly updated an economic analysis of the repeal’s costs and benefits. Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, faulted the new analysis for only focusing on how the repeal would affect individual states, instead of looking at how varied levels of state waterway protections could lower water quality in states with strong protections if they are downstream of those that are more lax.

“This court decision is very good news for public health in many parts of the country,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, said in a statement. Revesz said the Trump administration “has consistently flouted” a core obligation of the Clean Air Act, to protect the air quality of downwind states that suffer from excessive upwind pollution. “A number of related cases are pending and this decision may be the harbinger of further defeats for the EPA,” he said.

If justices ultimately decide in favor of the Trump administration and find the Clean Air Act does not allow the government to direct broad changes to the nation’s energy deployment, it could permanently weaken the United States’ ability to tackle its contributions to global warming. “It would have a devastating effect on the ability of future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor at New York University who specializes in environmental law. “It would essentially make it extremely difficult to regulate greenhouse gases effectively,” he said.

Though standards limiting vehicle emissions have played a critical role in controlling U.S. air pollution, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have imminent plans to roll back emissions standards for model years 2021 and beyond. As part of the proposal, the agencies have put California in their crosshairs. But leaving California alone could help keep the air cleaner and avoid the political and legal uncertainty caused by picking that fight with California.

The Trump administration appears to be entering an alarming new stage of its attack on environmental protection. EPA has recently decided it will change the way it collects and processes data, to provide better justification to dismantle the analytical foundation of its rules.The consequences for the environment and public health could be disastrous. But even as this approach might be more deliberate, these actions are unlikely to survive court challenges as well.

In court the administration has lost most of the environmental cases it has faced. It has been defeated in more than 90 per cent of the 41 legal actions related to regulatory rollbacks, in which a final outcome was reached, according to a database at the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law.