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Administrations usually win 70% of the cases brought against them, but Team Trump has won only about 16% of the 132 decided lawsuits. These figures include 14 of 83 lawsuits about environment, energy and natural resources; seven of 53 lawsuits about deregulation; and 3 of 26 lawsuits about health. “Over and over and over the Trump agencies are doing things that are outside the bounds of their statutory authority,” said Bethany Davis Noll, the litigation director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.

The Center for Biological Diversity is just one of the environmental organizations that have been using the courts to challenge the Trump rollbacks. Overwhelmingly, these suits have succeeded. Only 12 out of 81 lawsuits related to environment, energy, and natural resources deregulation were decided in the Trump administration’s favor as of August 31, according to the Institute of Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

At the conclusion of this year’s Supreme Court term, political scientist Lee Epstein and law professor Eric Posner observed that Trump “has prevailed only 47 percent of the time” before the high court, “a worse record than that of his predecessors going back at least as far as Franklin D. Roosevelt.” The situation is even uglier in the lower courts. The New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity has calculated that just 14 percent of the Trump administration’s regulatory actions were upheld against challenges in the lower courts — the rest were blocked or withdrawn. Trump’s recent predecessors have tended to win on regulatory matters at least 60 percent of the time.

The Natural Resources Defense Council noted, “Nothing in NEPA gives the president the authority to side-step the environmental review and public participation the statute requires.” New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity added that any exemptions allowed are for “true emergencies” that threaten lives and that it is “an enormous stretch to claim the economic crisis from COVID-19 fits.”

The EPA’s top lawyer is trumpeting the agency’s success rate in court, saying it’s won two-thirds of “significant” environmental cases during the Trump administration. But the assertion, made by the agency’s general counsel, Matthew Z. Leopold, clashes with—and also comes in response to—other tallies showing judges have largely sided with the EPA’s state and environmental adversaries. A New York University Institute for Policy Integrity analysis, for example, lists just nine EPA wins out of 47 regulatory cases tracked. Policy Integrity's litigation director Bethany Davis Noll, who oversees the institute’s tracker, said the EPA’s list had nearly two dozen cases that she had left off because they were either duplicative, still pending, not focused on Trump-era actions, or resolved on procedural grounds rather than on the merits.

Trump Jr. delivered a forceful indictment: "The other party is attacking the very principles on which our nation was founded: Freedom of thought. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. The rule of law.” Never mind that the Trump administration has been forced to reverse course more than 100 times after being sued for violating the rule of law, according to the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity.

In some cases, Trump administration efforts are hitting delays and possibly brick walls. The Administrative Procedure Act requires that a new rule must have a “reasoned explanation” for it to be sound – or withstand a lawsuit, says Bethany Davis Noll of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. If some Trump moves leave a lasting mark, in other cases the president’s actions could face reversals – notably in cases where his policies lack strong economic or scientific footing. “I think most presidents want some kind of legacy,” Davis Noll says, and in her view “that’s what he hasn’t managed to accomplish.”

The U.S. Supreme Court made a significant move toward a “unitary executive” vision of Article II in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB. In this 5-4 decision, the Court relied on misleading arguments and revisionist history to strike down the statutory provision granting for-cause removal protection to the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

To date, challenges to Trump’s deregulatory actions have been very successful. The Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law found that the Trump administration has lost 87% of challenges to its regulations, guidance documents, and agency memoranda.

Trump’s regulatory legacy will be greatly shaped in coming months by court rulings in lawsuits challenging some of his most potentially consequential rollbacks. “He needs to win reelection in order to defend those rules in court, and even then I think it’s going to be a longshot to win some of those,” said Bethany Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.