In its original proposal, the Trump EPA relied on recent Supreme Court decisions that said its authority to act on climate was restricted under current law, and close observers expect that will be the administration’s strategy.
“We expect the EPA to rescind the endangerment finding for legal reasons, not scientific reasons,” said Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the Bracewell law firm who served as head of the EPA’s air office during the administration of President George W. Bush. As Administrator Zeldin has said, “This is the only way they can ‘put the stake in the center of the climate religion’.”
If this is about law and not science, how has the law changed since 2009?
Legal experts say the second Trump administration was confident of investigating the threat largely because of how the president reshaped the Supreme Court in his first term. In two 6-3 decisions by conservative majorities backed by three Trump appointees, the justices created a new doctrine that limited the power of federal regulatory agencies like the EPA.
“We have had an administrative law revolution,” said industry lawyer Matthew Leopold, who was EPA general counsel in Trump’s first term, speaking at a forum last fall at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. “The playground the Obama administration was playing on [when it made the endangerment finding] “It looks completely different today.”
The Supreme Court struck down Obama’s signature climate policy, the Clean Energy Plan, in 2022. And in that case, West Virginia vs. EPAThe court established its so-called “key question doctrine”, holding that the regulation of greenhouse gases was an issue of such great economic and political importance that the EPA could not regulate them without express direction from Congress. Then, in a 2024 case on fishing regulations, the Supreme Court overturned a principle that had guided regulatory law for 40 years, saying federal agencies had no objection to interpreting ambiguities in the law. The Court held that judges, not agencies, should decide the meaning of the law, even though the environmental field generally involves the application of knowledge of science and best available technologies to curb pollution.
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