Recent Projects – Our Impacts

Policy Integrity filed amicus briefs in Supreme Court and Federal Circuit litigation over President Trump’s worldwide tariffs. The court decisions in both cases mirrored our articulation of the major questions doctrine and adopted key arguments that we raised.

Policy Integrity’s amicus brief has played an important role in litigation over President Trump's tariffs. The government devoted several pages of one of its briefs to responding to our arguments that the doctrine applies to presidential actions and that the President’s tariffs were both unheralded and transformative, in addition to being economically and politically significant. During oral argument, one of the judges on the Court of International Trade cited our amicus brief and noted that history also plays a role in the major questions analysis and prompted plaintiffs to engage with that point. And ultimately, the Court of International Trade cited our brief and articulated our formulation of the major questions doctrine in its opinion.

At PJM’s April 2025 meeting on Order No. 1920 implementation, PJM announced that, in response to stakeholder feedback like ours, it has sought assistance from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on adopting a co-optimized approach to transmission planning. Once PJM implements this approach, it will rewrite current industry standards and emerge as a national leader on the issue.

The plaintiff environmental groups in the case (Healthy Gulf v. Haaland, D.D.C. No. 1:23-cv-00604) frequently cited and quoted from Policy Integrity’s work on substitution analysis to argue that BOEM’s analysis was flawed because it assumed near-constant reliance on fossil fuels over the coming decades. Accordingly, the plaintiffs argued that BOEM severely understated the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from offshore leasing above the no-leasing scenario.

In January 2025, CFPB issued a finding of no significant impact and accompanying environmental assessment (EA) regarding the CFPB’s consideration of a proposed rule to implement a Congressional mandate to establish consumer protections for residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing. In the EA, CFPB cited values for the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) from the calculator on Policy Integrity’s Cost of Carbon Website.

On January 3, 2025, the Department of Treasury promulgated a final rule implementing the Section 45V Clean Hydrogen Production Tax Credit from the Inflation Reduction Act. Because this tax credit subsidizes the production of hydrogen based on the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of the hydrogen, the final rule establishes protocols for measuring these emissions. The final rule reflects several Policy Integrity recommendations related to measuring the lifecycle emissions of electrolytic hydrogen and possible exceptions to the incrementality requirement in the proposed rule.

CFPB recently finalized its overdraft credit rule, which closes a loophole that allowed banks to charge exorbitant overdraft fees to consumers without providing the types of disclosure usually required for consumer credit. Together with a fantastic team of clinic students, we submitted comments on the Proposed Rule, offering suggestions for how CFPB could strengthen its economic analysis. The rule's analysis generally aligns with our recommendations, with one section mirroring one of our arguments quite closely.

In December 2024, the Federal Trade Commission finalized a rule to prohibit hidden fees that are revealed to consumers late in the purchasing process, a practice sometimes known as “drip pricing.” This rule is based on a petition for rulemaking from Policy Integrity calling for a ban on this practice, which the FTC granted when it initiated the rulemaking. The final rule extensively cites Policy Integrity’s work including comments on FTC’s legal authority and proposed rule.

In oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on the DOE Energy Conservation Standards the judges noted that "Monte Carlo" sounds like gambling and so sounds random and inherently "arbitrary." The DOJ attorney responded that the technique in general and DOE's approach in this case is used all the time by other agencies and by academics, which is an argument Policy Integrity made uniquely in our brief.

In May 2023, the NYPSC initiated a process regarding the CLCPA's Zero Emissions Target, and the early phases of that process have focused on interpreting the 2040 goal, which is fraught with ambiguity. To date, this process has included two requests for public comment as well as a Department of Public Service technical conference. Policy Integrity has made comments throughout, and hosted a conference on state-level pathways to zero-emissions electric grids, focusing in significant part on this statutory requirement. On November 4, DPS Staff filed a document proposing definitions of key terms that aligns with Policy Integrity's recommendations and approach in key respects.