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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.”

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.

Richard Revesz shares his thoughts on how the transition to a new presidential administration later this month will impact U.S. environmental and climate change policy.

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.

Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been floated as a possible Biden OIRA administrator, said generally the Trump administration's regulatory aggressiveness is "unusual." "It's part of a larger story to get stuff out at the very end where the regulatory initiatives are on the whole extremely harmful," he said. Revesz pointed to a Health and Human Services Department proposal that would force all the agency's regulations to sunset within 10 years, unless a review is completed.

EPA last week pushed out a major rule on environmental analysis in the twilight of President Trump's term, a move that could bolster legal challenges to climate rules ushered in by the incoming Biden administration. "It seems like it's designed to set up legal challenges to EPA rules, filed by industry, that argue if one looks only to the targeted benefits ... that the statutory provision at issue contemplates, the rule is not justified," said Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity. Biden may want to get this "potential land mine" out of the way before finalizing lengthier rulemaking on emissions, said Lienke.

Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, argues that the rule is an example of regulatory “asymmetry” under which the Trump EPA has been “prioritizing costs and belittling benefits,” with the rule making it easier for indirect benefits of rules to be ignored. “It is like separate but equal. Separate but equal is not equal,” he says

The cost-benefit rule, which changes the way the E.P.A. shifts economic analyses of Clean Air Act regulations to limit future air pollution controls, is not expected to survive the incoming Biden administration. “It’s like breaking all the calculators on the way out the door,” said Jack Lienke of New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “The people coming in can buy new calculators. It’s just a hurdle and takes some time. It’s just another annoyance for the incoming administration to deal with. ”