Trump EPA Unveils Aggressive Plans to Dismantle Climate Regulation, Endangerment Finding

CLIMATEWIRE | EPA on Wednesday announced it was walking away from virtually every important climate policy on the books, charting an aggressive course on deregulation that will take years to complete — and compliant courts.

The agency at the center of federal climate action said it would roll back bedrock scientific findings, kill climate rules, terminate grants that are already under contract, and change how it collects and uses greenhouse gas data. Taken together, the plans would effectively remove EPA from addressing climate change at a time when global temperatures have soared to heights never experienced by humans.

“It’s Christmas in March,” said Myron Ebell, who led President Donald Trump’s 2017 EPA transition team and has long advocated for many of those policies.

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EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin declared on the social media platform X that the agency is “initiating 31 historic actions,” including “reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy and cost Americans trillions of dollars.”

Among his announced moves is a plan to revoke the 2009 scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health — the legal predicate for all Clean Air Act climate rules. He called the finding “the holy grail of the climate change religion.” Zeldin also plans to weaken or rescind rules that were enacted to reduce climate pollution from power plants, oil and gas infrastructure and vehicles.

“The vibes are bad,” said Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. While regulatory rollbacks have been expected since Trump won the election, she said, “I think the breadth of the list today was pretty surprising, and it really puts on a platter how little they care about human health and the environment.”

But EPA can’t undo all of those policies quickly.

Zeldin’s plans to reconsider the endangerment finding — the scientific assessment that underpins EPA’s authority to regulate carbon dioxide and five other warming gases — first requires the agency to set up new scientific advisory boards to replace those it disbanded. EPA announced plans to start taking nominations for new members Wednesday.

After the new boards offer scientific input, EPA would use it to draft a proposed endangerment finding. The agency must then take public comment and respond before finalizing the new finding — a year’s work, at least.

Because the endangerment finding underpins most climate rules, rewriting the scientific finding can streamline the process of undoing those rules for power plants, cars and other sectors. Instead of writing a replacement rule, it could merely roll many of those rules back — a far simpler process.

And Trump administration officials who served in his first term would understand the benefits of that. When EPA decided to leave the finding alone in the first term, it compelled the agency to write a new power plant rule to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan it wanted to repeal. That multiyear process ended with a rebuke in federal court and allowed then-President Joe Biden to enact his own climate rule.

But undoing the endangerment finding is a high-risk gamble.

If EPA spends years trying to do it, only to have the courts disagree, that delay could cripple the agency’s deregulatory plans and make it easier for a new administration to promulgate tougher rules.

The agency indicated that it might pursue efforts to roll back climate rules while it also attacks the endangerment finding. But it’s unclear if EPA is planning to replace Biden-era rules related to power plants, cars and methane from oil and gas facilities or just to repeal them. Getting rid of the endangerment finding might allow the agency to forgo new rules for many of those sources — if the courts upheld that move.

EPA declined requests from POLITICO’s E&E News to clarify whether it would draft replacement rules for those sectors simultaneously with the endangerment finding.

Phasing down climate-forcing coolants — known as hydrofluorocarbons — is a rare instance of a climate rule that might not depend on the endangerment finding. That’s because it’s underpinned by authorities Congress granted in a bipartisan law that Trump signed in 2020, called the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act.

But EPA has targeted those rules, too, on the grounds that they contribute to food inflation by forcing “companies to use particular technologies for refrigerant systems that raise the cost of food at the grocery store.”

Cutting rules, staff and grants

EPA’s regulatory plans would be ambitious in any administration. But Zeldin’s announcements come after he said EPA would lay off 65 percent of the agency’s workforce.

“If I were an EPA staffer, I’d kind of be looking around me like, ‘Who exactly is going to do all this work?” said Hankins of NRDC. “Because they will have to individually repeal every single one of these regulations.”

EPA is pursuing other lines of attack against climate action.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, EPA announced plans to “terminate” hundreds of Inflation Reduction Act grant awards that are already under contract. That includes eight awards held in Citibank accounts that have been been frozen for weeks. Nearly 400 smaller environmental justice and community pollution control grants were also terminated Wednesday after recipients discovered that their access to the federal government’s grant portal was severed Friday, raising the prospects that EPA could face many additional lawsuits for breach of contract.

Three nonprofits that were awarded a combined $14 billion last year to expand lending for zero-carbon energy, transportation and buildings filed three separate lawsuits earlier this week to recover those funds that had been frozen and have since been “terminated.” Climate United, which was awarded the largest grant of $7 billion, is suing EPA and Citibank, which is administering the program. The Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities each filed suits targeting the bank, but the Coalition for Green Capital expanded its suit Wednesday to include EPA and Zeldin after Citibank disclosed that federal agencies had pressured it to freeze the funds.

EPA on Wednesday also committed to “revisit” its social cost of greenhouse gas emissions — a metric agencies have long used to reflect damage from a ton of climate-forcing pollution.

Zeldin said in a press release that Biden’s EPA used the metric, which it increased to $190 per ton, “to advance their climate agenda in a way that imposed major costs.” He didn’t say whether EPA would stop using a social cost of carbon or propose a smaller one based on different assumptions.

Courts have directed federal agencies in the past to account for climate damages in their regulatory analyses, including by monetizing them. So, opting not to do so in future rules could be legally risky.

“The government has worked with social costs of greenhouse gases values for over 15 years at this point, and to totally ignore those values — which were based on extensive science and economics developed over decades — to ignore that work entirely would be pretty legally fraught,” said Max Sarinsky, regulatory director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University.

But the Trump EPA could opt to change what climate damages it includes in its metric and could use a higher discount rate for future costs, which could reduce the values and make less aggressive policies look more cost-effective.

EPA on Wednesday also pledged to rethink a rule that requires major emitters to report their greenhouse gas output each year. The reporting rule is the basis for EPA’s annual emissions inventory, which it submits to the United Nations each year. It also informs regulations and other policy decisions.

This story also appears in Energywire.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.