In the News

President Biden issued a sweeping executive order Wednesday to review former President Trump's environmental rollbacks across the federal government. "It is an unusually long list of regulations to be reviewed," said Richard Revesz, whose name has been floated as a potential White House regulatory chief. "The reason for the unusual length of this list is that no prior administration has ever taken so many actions that do so much harm to the health of the American people and the environment."

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s law school, a non-partisan group, said EPA’s legal theory has been “unsupportable” and called the erstwhile ACE regulation the Trump administration’s top environmental policy.

“It’s fitting that, on the Trump administration’s last day in office, the D.C. Circuit forcefully struck down the signature item of its environmental agenda,’’ said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law.

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.

The Department of Health and Human Services' insidious new policy, known as the Sunset Rule, commits it to reassessing the economic impacts of almost every one of the department’s existing regulations and establishes an extreme penalty for noncompliance: If a regulation is not reviewed by its 10th anniversary, it simply blinks out of existence. HHS claims the power to repeal thousands of rules at once without so much as explaining what they do, much less justifying the harm that could arise in their absence.

Trump administration policies can be undone using the same aggressive techniques that the administration itself used. The primary tools that President Trump relied on, such as executive orders and guidance, do not make for permanent or durable U.S. policy. And many Trump-era regulations were poorly executed and supported, making it easier to undo those rules.

"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.