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.

Senate Republicans are worried that BlackRock could take climate change–related financial risks into account in making its securities purchase recommendations, as the firm has pledged to do when shaping its own investment strategies. If BlackRock is going to make the best decisions for American taxpayers, it must be allowed to assess these climate risks as it does for other clients.

While states are right that new FERC rules will needlessly increase costs and be a drag on clean energy, they shouldn’t rush to exit electricity markets yet. States could meet their climate goals while retaining the benefits of markets by pursuing another option: carbon pricing.

The Trump administration’s recent rollback of Clean Car Standards relies on a significant number of obvious analytical flaws and provides a textbook example of the type of “arbitrary and capricious” conduct prohibited by the Administrative Procedure Act.

“Accepting the administration’s own numbers—and some of them are highly suspect, and most are just wrong, but accepting the numbers upfront—the rule is net costly,” Richard Revesz, the Lawrence King Professor of Law at NYU, told me. He is director of the university’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “This rule is actually causing deaths, even under their analysis.”

The Trump administration significantly weakened the most important existing regulation limiting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions: the “Clean Car Standards,” which were also set to save consumers billions of dollars by making new cars and trucks use less fuel. If the administration’s track record is any indication, the courts are likely to see through the manipulation involved. But in the meantime, the end result will be substantial economic, climate, and public health harms.

“The rollback of the vehicle emissions standards is based on analysis that is shoddy even by the shockingly unprofessional standards of Trump-era deregulation,” said Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity and dean emeritus at New York University School of Law.

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.

Using three instruments—Congressional Review Act disapprovals, requests that courts hold in abeyance pending cases challenging Obama-era regulations, and suspensions of final regulations—the Trump Administration was able to reach a far greater proportion of regulations than would have been possible under prior practices. And in this way, the Trump Administration has ushered in a new era of aggressive regulatory rollbacks that is likely to become an enduring feature of American politics and to radically change the nature of the presidency.