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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.

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 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 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.

An efficient approach would be to pass one bill aimed at enacting the "Green New Deal," because it could go after multiple sectors at once, said Derek Sylvan, strategy director at New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity.

Such a bill would have clear goals and pathways to meet targets, which could then be put into place through regulatory approaches, he said.

One potential model might be America's Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, S. 3021, which sought to incorporate local input into projects and safeguards to make sure state infrastructure spending meets specific criteria, Sylvan said.

According to Derek Sylvan, strategy director for the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University's School of Law, the executive order "creates a new, irrational way" of evaluating all past and present regulations. "Every regulation will be judged on its costs alone, ignoring the benefits it was designed to create," he says. "If we scrap a regulation that imposes $10 of costs on industry in exchange for $500 of avoided hospital visits, we haven't "saved" society $10; we've thrown away $490. But this order would ignore the $500 in benefits."