Environmental groups that fought bruising courtroom battles with the first Trump administration are steeling themselves for another round amid a barrage of executive orders, firings and funding cuts.
In interviews with more than a half-dozen of the most prominent groups, executives said that some — but not all — legal challenges could take time to develop, partly because many of President Trump’s orders haven’t yet translated into the kinds of tangible actions that can be directly fought in court, like specific rule changes.
But “Trump’s obviously come out gunning for all the climate and clean-energy standards and incentives,” said David Doniger, a senior strategist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
These groups said they are already seeing potential weaknesses in the Trump administration’s broad approach to eliminating jobs at the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal offices. The E.P.A. has demoted career officials and placed 168 employees in its Office of Environmental Justice on leave. The Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division has also seen major shake-ups.
The problem, they say, is that slashing staff today could make it harder for the administration to rewrite and weaken regulations later. That’s because rule-making is a technical process that could benefit from the expertise of the people being let go.
“It’s hard to dismantle agencies and get a lot done at the same time,” said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest environmental-law organization. Rule changes made quickly or carelessly “will be vulnerable to legal challenges,” she said.
That’s what happened in the first Trump administration, which had a dismal win rate in court. Bethany Davis Noll, executive director of the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center at New York University School of Law, is the author of a 2021 study on the first Trump administration’s record before the courts. She found that previous administrations had prevailed in about 70 percent of legal challenges to agency actions, but that rate dropped to 23 percent in the Trump years.
Some of those losses occurred because officials did not follow basic steps laid out in the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946, Ms. Davis Noll said: To change a rule, an agency has to carefully demonstrate the benefit of the change and respond to public comments, including from industry and environmental groups. Officials in the Biden years put together detailed records to support their rules, she said, and those could prove to be difficult to challenge in court or reverse, even with fully staffed offices.
“You’re not going to be able to finalize a bunch of rollbacks if you don’t have people in the agency,” Ms. Davis Noll said.
In a written response, an E.P.A. spokesperson said that it would “follow the law and science to fulfill its mission to protect human health and the environment.”
The new E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, has vowed to approach policy-making carefully as the agency tries to improve its win rate in court. The first Trump administration was met with lawsuits from environmentalists that number in the hundreds. This time around, it could be even more.
Early battles are likely to center on issues like auto-emissions standards, as well as moves that the Biden administration made late in its term, like barring most new offshore oil and gas drilling.
Environmental groups have in recent days moved to intervene or filed briefs in several cases to protect existing rules on air pollution. They said they may also get involved in the existing lawsuits against the Trump administration’s early moves.
In particular they cited the Trump administration’s attacks on funding through the Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, both of which allocated money for clean-energy projects like electric-vehicle charging stations. The new administration has paused this kind of spending.
“The funding pause is a climate fight,” said Joanne Spalding, director of the Environmental Law Program at the Sierra Club. Those lawsuits are being filed not by environmental groups but by states and nonprofits that are more directly affected by the withdrawal of federal funding.
She also pointed to the continuing challenges to Biden-era rules that are still being litigated. The new administration has been asking courts to put cases on hold as it re-evaluates whether it will continue to defend those cases.
Jeremy Symons, a senior adviser at the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former E.P.A. employees formed in 2017, noted an emerging tension between what he described as the “burn the place down” approach of Elon Musk to deregulation and the more “carefully crafted agenda of the polluter lobby.”
“If you want to get anything done at E.P.A., you know, you need the expertise that career staff provide,” Mr. Symons, said, “and threatening, traumatizing and firing career staff is a sure path to undermine your own agenda.”
One of the first moves by the Environmental Defense Fund was to submit Freedom of Information Act requests for copies of agency communications relating to energy and environmental-policy changes. “We will stay engaged both in the court of law and the court of public opinion,” said Vickie Patton, the group’s general counsel.
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