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However, the Trump administration’s attempt to deregulate was also often thwarted by the courts. All told, the Trump administration lost 57 percent of cases challenging its environmental policies, a much higher rate of loss than previous administrations, according to a database maintained by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

Project 2025 urges the agency to “revise guidance documents” for the so-called social cost of carbon, while another chapter proposes ending its use altogether. Co-benefits — a rule’s health and environmental advantages that aren’t tied directly to reducing a targeted pollutant — have been persona non grata with conservatives for years. But the Trump EPA did count them in its climate rules — which showed minuscule benefits due in part to low social cost values for greenhouse gases. Jason Schwartz, policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, said sidelining benefits could make rules less legally durable. “I think that the courts have been clear in a number of cases that it would actually be arbitrary for an agency to ignore — or to really treat differently — co-benefits or indirect costs,” he said.

The state commissioners’ objections to FERC’s order likely would not be the case to introduce the claim to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because their rehearing request to FERC was limited to factual questions about the agency’s statutory interpretation, said Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “That is not to say that other Order 1920 suits might not invoke Loper Bright or Chevron’s demise more squarely, and I suspect that many will try arguments related to that out for size,” Danis said in an email.

Jason Schwartz, the legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks often ignored congressional statutes or inflated the costs of regulations on industry. Mr. Trump’s allies have presumably learned from those missteps, experts said.

The number of restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations, a proxy for the intensity of regulation in America, was basically unchanged under Mr Trump. What is more, his administration was stymied by the courts. It was unsuccessful in nearly 80% of litigation over its use of federal agencies, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a research group.

I have noted that according to decades’ worth of studies compiled by Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, federal agencies have historically prevailed in about 70 percent of the legal challenges to their regulatory actions. But Noll’s study reviewing 278 Trump-era agency actions (48 involving immigration) found that federal agencies prevailed only 23 percent of the time. As to appeals, Noll reported that “[o]f the appeals that the government took, agencies lost on appeal 38% of the time, … won reversal … in 12%, ... [and] another 48% … were pending.”

Altogether, [the Supreme Court's] actions to transfer authority from agencies to the judiciary could curtail a wide range of financial, environmental, workplace and consumer protections. “It’s just part of a continuing trend with the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court in particular, exercising more and more power … at the expense, potentially, of the other branches,” said Don Goodson, deputy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. 

“Congress doesn’t have the time or expertise to fill in the details for thousands of regulations, and it’s hard to anticipate the twists and turns of the future and exactly what [lawmakers] need to spell out specifically,” says Dena Adler, a senior attorney at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. Agencies use their expertise to turn broad-brush statutes into nitty-gritty policies, and the courts intervene only in extreme circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University School of Law in June 14 comments urges EPA to further examine the potential costs and benefits in the rule with specific regard to its environmental justice benefits, its interaction with climate risks, and its effect on future pollution patterns. “EPA should set secondary NAAQS that prevent anticipated adverse and disproportionate public welfare impacts on environmental justice communities, including potential impacts to drinking water quality, subsistence fishing, and recreational opportunities,” IPI says, calling EPA’s EJ analysis “abbreviated.”

New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) is backing the Energy Department’s (DOE) economic justification for tougher energy efficiency standards for gas-fired appliances, arguing the rules help address “market failures” in which consumers sometimes do not choose a more-efficient appliance even if it would save them costs over time. “DOE’s modeling approach reflects the complexities of accounting for consumer choices in markets where the energy-efficiency gap exists,” IPI writes in a June 17 amicus brief in American Gas Association (AGA), et al., v. DOE, et al before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.