EPA’s massive regulatory rollback may struggle to survive the scrutiny of the courts — but in its attempt to undercut environmental protections, the Trump administration may succeed in creating enough havoc to delay the nation’s response to the urgent problem of climate change.
In his Wednesday announcement of EPA’s deregulatory assault, Administrator Lee Zeldin offered few details on how the agency plans to dismantle dozens of climate, air and energy rules — and the science underpinning those regulations — particularly in light of the Trump administration’s push to shed thousands of EPA staffers and 65 percent of the agency’s budget.
To many legal experts, Zeldin’s effort echoes the rule-slashing strategy embraced by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt during the early days of President Donald Trump’s first term. The courts repeatedly struck down those efforts for violating the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal statute that sets the terms for how agencies can write — and rewrite — rules.
“There was a desire for quick fixes and silver bullets, and the EPA got burned with that under Pruitt,” said Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar and founding director of Case Western Reserve University’s environmental law center. “It almost seems like some of those lessons have been unlearned.”
Joe Goffman, former EPA air chief under former President Joe Biden, said Zeldin and other current officials may have gleaned from the first Trump administration’s court losses that they should find new workarounds for deregulation, rather than try to operate within legal constraints.
“Withdrawing the endangerment finding may be the governing shortcut,” he said, referring to EPA’s 2009 conclusion that carbon dioxide and other planet-warming pollution endanger public health and welfare. “If you actually withdraw that, think of how these dominoes would fall.”
The endangerment finding is one of the EPA actions on the Trump administration’s chopping block.
“Since 2009, I’ve consistently argued that the endangerment finding required a consideration of downstream costs imposed on both mobile sources like cars and stationary sources like factories,” said Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Jeff Clark in one of several press releases EPA issued Wednesday. “Under the enlightened leadership of President Trump and Administrator Zeldin, the time for fresh thought has finally arrived.”
Legal experts say the courts have consistently rejected that exact argument.
“If the goal is deregulation, then deregulate. Replacing more burdensome rules with less burdensome rules makes a lot of sense, and EPA has a lot of authority to do that. But the endangerment finding, just look at the language of the” Clean Air Act, said Adler. “The agency doesn’t have the sort of space that the administration wants with that language.”
Still, even if the courts reject the Trump administration’s rule-busting effort, EPA’s agenda could still have destructive practical effects, said Goffman.
“Even if they ultimately lose, just starting the process creates the kind of time-destroying chaos in what up until yesterday had been a robust climate policy regime,” he said in an interview Thursday. “Twenty-four hours in, the mission of sabotage is already on its way to success.”
There are rules for undoing rules
In pursuing its regulation-slashing effort, the new Trump administration will need to overcome the legal mistakes it made during the president’s first term.
An analysis by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity found that the first Trump administration prevailed in legal challenges to agency actions a mere 23 percent of the time, compared to a 70 percent win rate by prior administrations.
Each rollback EPA pursues must show that the repeal is not arbitrary and capricious under the APA and aligns with congressional authority, wrote Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, in an email.
“Decisions that lack an evidentiary or rational basis, that are contrary to well-established consensus science, or are based on purely political considerations or policy preferences that bear no connection to the requirements set forth by Congress should fail in court, every time,” he said.
The Supreme Court’s ruling last year eliminating deference to agencies’ reading of ambiguous laws — known as the Chevron doctrine — now requires judges to decide what is the “best” reading of a statute.
That could mean EPA will now face a tougher road in justifying rule changes. “But the courts may well assert a more prominent role in determining whether the initial rule or the reversed rule reflect the best reading of the statute,” Burger said.
One way the administration may try to sidestep the traditional rulemaking process could be to issue interim final rules, like the White House Council on Environmental Quality did to undo its National Environmental Policy Act regulations, said James Coleman, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.
CEQ cited a “good cause” exemption to the APA, allowing it to quickly finalize the rule rescission. EPA would have to do the same, Coleman said.
But legal experts cautioned that the approach would not hold up in court.
“The only legally defensible way of doing it is for notice-and-comment rulemaking,” said Richard Revesz, former OIRA administrator under the Biden administration. He recently returned as dean emeritus to the NYU School of Law.
“Doing the hard work of running the rulemaking process and doing it in a way that has the integrity necessary to survive judicial scrutiny is very hard work, and they haven’t done any of it,” he said. “And frankly, the experience of the first Trump term suggests that they will do it very badly.”
The endangerment finding is a tough target
EPA will have an especially hard time withdrawing the endangerment finding, which serves as the foundation for rules the agency said Wednesday that it intends to knock down.
The process is different from rewriting rules and would take at least a year. EPA would first need new scientific advisory boards to replace panels it previously disbanded. Then the agency would need to take their input and use it to write a proposed finding before taking public comment and finalizing its new conclusion on the dangers of greenhouse gases.
Even then, the move is not a surefire way to erase swaths of EPA rules, said Adler.
“There is this idea that it is kind of a quick fix because once you get rid of endangerment finding, you get rid of the trigger for all this other regulation,” he said. “I totally get that impulse because the endangerment finding is a trigger [for regulation], but that’s the way the statute’s written.”
The language Trump officials used in EPA’s Wednesday press release on the endangerment finding appears to repeat the same stumbles the George W. Bush administration made before the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants subject to federal regulation, Adler wrote in a Wednesday blog post.
He said the Supreme Court made it clear that EPA cannot simply decline to regulate planet-warming pollutants, and the 2007 ruling paved the way for the Obama administration to issue the endangerment finding in 2009.
“Trying to undo endangerment finding in a way that could satisfy judicial review is going to be a lot of work,” Adler said. “I’m skeptical it’s ultimately doable.”
Revesz noted that the Trump administration also previously relied on the endangerment finding in its own regulations on climate pollution from power plants and motor vehicles.
“The science is clear,” Revesz said. “The interpretation of the statute has been consistent for all of this time.”
EPA is bleeding staff
Already, EPA struggles to keep up with myriad required tasks spelled out in the Clean Air Act and other environmental statutes. Now, Zeldin’s call to action will pile on more work just as the agency grapples with downsizing pressure from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Nearly 400 probationary employees have already been fired and, like other executive branch agencies, EPA faces a Thursday deadline to turn in plans for a reduction in force that could lead to bigger layoffs.
The agency “is in a bind,” said Jeremy Symons, senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network, a group made up mostly of former EPA employees that opposes Trump administration policies.
“They can either aggressively pursue their reckless agenda of rolling back dozens of public health regulations, or they can gut EPA’s staff,” Symons continued in an email. “They can’t do both, because each rollback requires a team of experts who know what they are doing.”
Asked for comment Tuesday, an EPA press aide pointed to comments by Zeldin this week on the social media platform now known as X, in which he said that EPA spent and awarded more than $63 billion last year.
“To accomplish our core mission and power the great American comeback, it actually only requires less than 35 percent of that total,” Zeldin said. “We don’t want the extra money, and we don’t need it.”
But, as EPA has previously acknowledged, some of the $63 billion total came from funding provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
That money is largely used for grants apart from EPA’s core budget, which totaled about $10 billion in 2024. The press aide, who did not identify themself, did not reply to a follow-up query asking how much money Zeldin thinks is needed for EPA to carry out its statutory responsibilities and also pursue his newly announced rollback plans.
But rewriting rules with fewer employees won’t be easy, Adler said.
“We learned when Pruitt was EPA administrator that trying to do things out of the administrator’s office without the staff support of the agency experts is really challenging,” he added.
The courts may be incidental
Despite staffing shortages and clear legal precedent on how agencies must craft regulations, the Trump administration’s rule-gutting project may still achieve its ultimate ambition — hampering meaningful climate action in the face of rapidly rising global temperatures.
Goffman, now a volunteer at the Environmental Protection Network, noted as one example the agency’s tailpipe rules, which set emissions standards for cars starting with model year 2027 and are one target of Zeldin’s deregulatory agenda. To comply, automakers have already begun retooling their assembly lines and reconfiguring their supply chains.
Now, Goffman said, carmakers will be waiting to hear if EPA is planning a change to — or repeal of — the emissions rules. In the meantime, he said, litigation on the matter will take years to work through the courts.
“Just creating a world-class mess is victory,” said Goffman. “What the courts ultimately end up deciding to do is secondary.”
He continued: “In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you need these big capital-intensive industries to make these changes, which takes time. Breaking that timeline — which these actions will do, regardless of the outcome of litigation — achieves a significant objective.”
