In the News

Recent groundbreaking legal and business decisions mark a turning point for longstanding advocacy against pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. And while they don’t represent any sort of change of heart in the federal government, they can be understood as examples of the laws we already had on the books working—and working particularly well in the face of incompetence. They also serve as a harbinger of future costly outcomes, especially when agencies and project proponents cut corners rather than fully analyze environmental effects and engage the public in decision making.

Richard L. Revesz, a law professor and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, said events described in the memo amounted to “uncharted waters” and reflected a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s actions toward inspectors general at other agencies. “The inspectors general are part of a system of ensuring that agencies operate within the law,” Mr. Revesz said. “Every citizen should actually care about that.”

Bethany Davis Noll, who directs NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity, noted that “Republican-appointed judges are finding against the administration at a similar rate to the Democratic judges.” And these losses at the hands of Republican appointees run the gamut, from immigration to environment to health care. Both the census and DACA cases “went against the administration even though the Supreme Court is majority Republican,” Noll said.

The rulings showed that in key instances Trump's administration has been unable to craft high-profile policies that will stand up in court. The administration has lost 79 out of 85 cases involving federal agencies on deregulatory or policy issues tracked by the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank connected to New York University School of Law.

A mysterious group has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to kill net metering. FERC should say no – not because net metering should last forever, but because states, not the feds, have the tools needed to reform it.

Even if interest groups battle rollbacks in court, federal officials could just stop enforcing some regulations, said New York University School of Law professor Richard Revesz. “Agencies have a fair amount of discretion of when to bring enforcement actions,” he said.

“At a time when more than 100,000 Americans have died from Covid and we know about this connection, the Trump administration is going to put in place some analytical techniques that will make it easier for them to kill more Americans,” said Richard Revesz, an expert on environmental law at New York University. Mr. Revesz and others said the change also defies the intent of the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970.

In a recent essay, William Yeatman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, takes issue with the central conclusions of our recent essay in The Regulatory Review, “Regulatory Rollbacks Have Changed the Nature of Presidential Power.” Yeatman’s discussion of our piece is flawed. Most importantly, he wrongly attributes to us the view that the Trump Administration “has been too effective in rolling back Obama-era rules.” The claim in our article is far narrower and very different.

Richard Revesz of NYU’s School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity filed the amicus brief on behalf of Maryland and Delaware. He said the ruling made clear the EPA is obligated to prevent states from harming the air quality of their neighboring states when emissions travel downwind and “can’t cite cost as a reason to ignore the law altogether.”

The vanishing of the daily commute has brought to light the burden of cars and trucks on health and the environment. As an intentional effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, at low cost to society, policymakers and businesses should continue to encourage working from home for jobs that allow it, even after the coronavirus crisis has receded.