In the News

Failures to defend its last-minute rules mirror the Trump administration’s poor overall record defending its deregulatory attempts in court. One analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University found the administration lost more than 80% of its legal attempts to undo regulations or write new rules.

“The ‘censored science’ rule was one of the Trump administration’s most brazen efforts to undermine the scientific foundations of regulatory policy,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said in a statement on Monday. “Today, the Trump anti-science effort, which had been opposed by the leadership of major scientific organizations, was quickly dispatched.”

Sens. Ed Markey and Tammy Duckworth and Rep. Cori Bush, flanked by leading environmental justice advocates, unveiled legislation on Thursday that would create an interagency task force to map environmental justice communities "based on cumulative impacts." The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law released its own report on improving environmental justice mapping.

It could take years for Mr. Biden to restore and strengthen all the Obama-era emissions regulations that his predecessor rolled back, my colleague Coral Davenport reports. That’s because the Trump administration almost never eliminated those regulations entirely; rather, it replaced them with new, weaker pollution regulations that Mr. Biden in turn must replace. “It’s a laborious, time-consuming process,” Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, told Ms. Davenport. “They may not get to some of these until the end of a first term.”

Customers were at the center of a panel discussion last week, hosted by the Institute for Policy Integrity and the Environmental Defense Fund, that highlighted what can happen when new state climate laws conflict with those currently governing fossil fuels. The discussion stemmed from research by Justin Gundlach and Elizabeth Stein, which casts light on policies under New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) that are inconsistent with other state polices that support residential customer access to natural gas.

The Western Energy Alliance, a trade group representing fossil fuel companies operating on federal lands, filed a lawsuit against Biden’s order on Wednesday, saying it was an overreach. But Jayni Foley Hein, natural resources director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, countered that the order is legally sound and was “written very carefully to avoid legal risk.” “It smartly pauses all new leasing, which Interior can do pursuant to multiple laws, and leaves the door open to more permanent curtailment in the future,” she said.

The Trump administration lost or withdrew proposed rule changes in almost 80% of 109 court challenges tracked by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University law school. Past administrations have lost or backed down in 30% of cases, said adjunct professor Bethany Davis Noll, who helped compile the data.

The recent history of developing long-haul pipelines in the U.S. demonstrates what can happen when certain bottlenecks go unaddressed, according to Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney with New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity. "You would absolutely see people who don't like transmission lines use NEPA to say that the agency responsible for siting this transmission line has failed to take the requisite hard look at the impacts, etc., etc. — no question," he said. Gundlach co-authored a recent study that outlined steps FERC could take to facilitate more long-distance, high-voltage direct-current electric transmission lines without waiting on additional legislation.

It will help Mr Biden that the Trump administration was not very adept at administrative law. A tracker by the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think-tank housed at New York University law school, found that 80% of lawsuits against the Trump administration’s regulatory changes were successful. Under a typical administration, that number is only 30%. With a second term, Mr Trump might have waited out some legal challenges and seen his changes to regulation become more entrenched. Yet “because Trump was a one-term president, his whole regulatory output is very shaky, and little of it will survive,” says Richard Revesz of NYU.

A recent report from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity looked at how the Energy Department and other regulators might use certain tools to help expand the nation’s transmission grid, a move that is central to reducing carbon emissions from the energy sector. The lead author, Avi Zevin, was recently hired by the Department of Energy as deputy general counsel for energy policy.