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The more rules that Trump’s agencies destroy in his last few days in office, the bigger the challenge facing the Biden administration to pick up the pieces. Trump’s real intention is “to clog up the works and slow the Biden administration down,” said Richard Revesz, an environmental regulatory expert at New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “Repealing and replacing them will take time, and will tie up agency resources."

The impending power shift in the Senate means Congress will once again turn to the Congressional Review Act to scrap a bevy of regulations. Hill Republicans and President Trump used the CRA to kill 16 Obama-era rules in 2017. Democrats, in contrast, have never deployed the CRA. "It's the quickest way to get rid of policies that will cause significant harms to the health of Americans and to the quality of our environment," said Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been mentioned as a possible Biden regulatory chief.

EPA Administrator Wheeler said the Congressional Review Act can’t be used because the rule is “an internal housekeeping regulation that does not affect external people to the agency,” and because it isn’t economically significant, meaning it isn’t expected to have an annual effect on the economy of at least $100 million. But Richard Revesz cast doubt on that analysis. “Whether a rule qualifies for disapproval is up to Congress to determine,” Revesz said. “Wheeler’s views are entitled to no deference. The decision is not up to him.”

New York University Law professor Richard Revesz said the new rule will likely be overturned by the courts, Congress or by the incoming Biden administration, but cautioned the damage in the near term is significant. “I would be very surprised if this rule is in effect in two years, but it will create burdens and difficulties in the meantime,” he said.

EPA's rule is a sharp break from its decades-old approach to new rules, which relied on certain studies to issue some of its most expansive regulations, including air quality standards for fine particle pollution. “This rule would bar regulators from considering bedrock scientific evidence about the dangers of pollution,” Richard Revesz said in a statement.

The Trump Administration’s commitment to deregulation has led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take contradictory positions across administrative proceedings during the last four years, argues New York University School of Law Professor Richard L. Revesz in a forthcoming article.

The Environmental Protection Agency released one of its last major rollbacks under the Trump administration, limiting what evidence it will consider about risks of pollutants. “Ignoring these research findings will lead to uninformed and insufficiently stringent standards, causing avoidable deaths and illnesses,” Richard Revesz said in a statement.

The Trump administration gutted protections for migratory birds on Tuesday, delivering the second of two parting gifts to the oil and gas industry. “These are definitely midnight regulations,” said Richard Revesz, an environmental law professor at New York University. “They’re 11:59 and 59 seconds regulations.”

Utilities that address climate risks will see benefits in their bottom lines, said Justin Gundlach, a senior attorney at the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity. "The fundamental point here is that it would be cheaper if they just looked at this hard and made prudent investments," he said.

The Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs has issued a paper, in partnership with the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, detailing how the federal government can enable the construction of the transmission infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the country’s power generation.