In the News

Automakers face higher fines for violating stringent federal fuel-efficiency standards requiring them to produce produce car fleets that average over 50 miles per gallon by 2025 after a court overturned a Trump administration decision to postpone a hike in the penalties. Sylwia Bialek, economic fellow at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, which filed a brief as an impartial adviser to the court on the case, said the court ruling overturning NHTSA’s decision to delay the fine increase for emission violators is significant, despite the fact that Trump administration is now weighing rolling back the rules completely.

Opportunities to learn about and comment on regulation abound online, leading to an explosion of public participation. It is now common for agencies to receive over 1 million public comments on a proposed regulation. But agencies don’t have the person-power to process all that information, resulting in costly delays and undercounted perspectives.

Looking just at compliance costs also ignores the vast number of benefits — both economic and social — that regulations like the Clean Power Plan can have for society overall. According to a 2017 analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University’s School of Law, for instance, costs of the Clean Power Plan would have been about $5.1 and $8.4 billion annually, while benefits would have been about $54 billion annually. This means that the Clean Power Plan would have created a net economic benefit of between $45.6 billion and $48.9 billion.

In the end, “a lot of those arguments were losers,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. In particular, Mr. Revesz noted a case brought by the group against President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, the Clean Power Plan, which Mr. Pruitt is now working to overturn from within the E.P.A. The lawsuit challenged a draft proposal of the regulation, which was an unprecedented move that a federal court quickly struck down, saying that they could not legally challenge a draft.

Federal agencies are supposed to abide by the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, to insure that the work informing new regulations is transparent, reasoned, and not overly politicized. Bethany Davis Noll, an environmental lawyer at the N.Y.U. Institute for Policy Integrity, said, “It’s also so you don’t have agencies turning on a dime in response to an election.” Courts hold agencies to the “arbitrary and capricious” standard: to rescind a regulation, they must demonstrate sound reasoning tied to a factual record.

The Trump Interior Department could not rush through an impact statement quickly just to get it out of the way, according to Jayni Foley Hein, policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. That’s because the National Environmental Policy Act, its regulations, and various court decisions have laid out firm guidelines about what a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement must include, she said.

Challenges to an EPA rule delaying a chemical safety regulation aimed at protecting emergency responders being argued March 16 could pose a test of the Trump administration’s push to roll back regulations. “Agencies need explicit statutory authority for their actions,” Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s plan to organize a “red team-blue team” exercise about climate change, consisting of a public debate over whether and to what degree human activities are causing global warming, was reportedly halted by Gen. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Kelly should be applauded for putting an end to a terrible idea that would have undermined, rather than increased, public understanding of a critical issue.

Although cap-and-trade programs for government permits to emit carbon dioxide occasionally make headline news, the average American may not realize that billions of dollars’ worth of government permits are auctioned or traded in a wide variety of industries, from broadcasting to construction to fishing.

A cascade of courtroom standoffs are beginning to slow, and even reverse, the EPA rollbacks thanks to the administration’s ‘disregard for the law.’ “The Trump administration has been sloppy and careless, they’ve shown significant disrespect for rule of law and courts have called them on it,” said Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University school of Law.