In the News

The Trump administration is inept. Evidence for this can be found in the administration’s victory record in the lower courts, where more run-of-the-mill cases are decided than in the Supreme Court. There, an astonishing statistic reveals itself: According to the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School, only 11 percent of Trump administration regulatory actions prevailed in the lower courts; the other 89 percent were blocked by courts or withdrawn. In contrast, academic research indicates that earlier presidents, since the 1990s or so, have prevailed 60 to 70 percent of the time on regulatory matters in the lower courts.

The Regulatory Review has invited leading scholars and analysts from across the country to assess the Court’s regulatory decisions from its recently concluded term. New York University School of Law's Richard Revesz will discuss Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and how, in striking down the for-cause provision governing the removal of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s single director, the Court implausibly distinguished this case from settled precedent, keeping an important building block of the administrative state in place for now. His essay will be published on August 5.

The Trump administration’s relentless push to gut dozens of environmental and public health safeguards worsened the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, a new report from New York University School of Law found. The lengthy analysis, which NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity published Tuesday, comes as President Donald Trump and his team act as if the coronavirus threat is waning — when the U.S. outbreak stands out as one of the worst in the world — and as they work to finalize a frenzy of environmental rollbacks ahead of November’s election.

As of 2017, the Trump administration’s new discount rate for SCC is between 3% to 7%—up from 2.5% to 5% during the Obama administration. When setting funding priorities and regulatory policy for government agencies, the Office of Management and Budget has been instructed to use the maximum rate of 7%. That leaves the US without many peers, says Peter Howard, an economics director at New York University School of Law’s think tank for government decision-making, Policy Integrity. “Few economists think that [discount rate] is appropriate,” said Howard. “Seven percent is an extreme outlier.”

New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity says the Trump administration has succeeded on only 11 of 99 legal challenges to its regulatory changes, with more than half its losses on environmental policy. Bethany Davis Noll, who manages the scorecard, said success rates in previous administrations hovered around 70%.

Jayni Hein of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University says the final rule -- published in the July 16 Federal Register after President Donald Trump personally unveiled it a day prior -- makes it seem like NEPA is “all about efficiently approving projects. There is a lot of new language that goes to efficiency and time limits and page limits, and the new regulation erases a lot of the discussion of the need for a careful analysis of environmental effects.”

Critics say Mr. Trump is overstating the impact of his deregulations, in part because the administration almost always loses court challenges to its actions. More than 88% of the administration’s deregulatory efforts through this week were blocked in court or withdrawn after a lawsuit, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank at the New York University School of Law.

When Congress creates a new independent agency, they give it a mix of features designed to insulate its decision-makers from different types of political oversight. In 2013, legal scholars Kirti Datla and Richard Revesz revealed that there is no single feature that all independent agencies possess, not even the removal protections at issue in Seila Law. They argue that independence should be viewed on a continuum rather than as a “constitutional force field” that can withstand all oversight.

The administration’s efforts to ease environmental regulations have worsened the impact of the pandemic, according to a new report. The analysis from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law pointed to the administration’s rollback of multiple regulations related to air pollution, power plants, ozone and particulate matter, HuffPost reports. It said the administration’s efforts were a “harbinger of the U.S. outbreak” and “exacerbated” many factors of the pandemic. 

The Trump administration’s estimate of the social cost of climate change is seven times lower than the amount used during the Obama administration, according to a Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office. Richard Revesz, Lawrence King professor of law and dean emeritus at NYU School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the GAO’s documentation of “ignoring the best science available” will weaken the Trump administration’s efforts to uphold its environmental deregulation in court. “This is yet another example of how the administration is ignoring science and economics in its policy decisions,” Revesz said. “Pretending that climate change will have virtually no impacts on Americans is completely disingenuous, and the resulting policy failures could have terrible consequences.”