Trump’s environmental rollbacks are being struck down by courts

The Trump administration’s many steps to reshape and shrink the scope of federal environmental protection have been met with a flood of legal challenges from companies, environmental groups and state officials. So far this summer, it’s been losing more than winning in court. Over the past three months, federal courts nationwide have delivered rulings in several cases centered on attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to terminate billions of dollars in climate grants and roll back Biden-era air policies.

In more than half of them, the judges decided against the agency. Some of those lawsuits remain unresolved. The is looking to appeal some of the cases it lost — or already has, according to agency spokesperson Brigit Hirsch.

The usual way a federal agency goes about rescinding an existing regulation is through a time-intensive process that involves proposing a new rule and taking public comment before issuing the final version. That’s not how the Trump went about trying to roll back the Biden administration’s update to what’s commonly called soot standards. Instead of starting a new rulemaking process to weaken them, last fall the Trump administration tried to achieve that via an existing court case.

When the Biden administration rolled out the new national standards in 2024, more than 20 Republican-led states sued to overturn them. The agency initially defended the stricter pollution standards in court, but under Trump, it reversed course. The Trump told the court that it no longer believed the agency had the authority to update the soot standards when it did and asked the court to toss them.

Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in June ruled 3-0 to reaffirm the stronger standards. At least in this case, she explained, the courts disagreed. In a separate case, a federal judge in California in July ordered the Trump to comply with a key legal deadline for implementing the soot standards, which it had ignored while the original case was pending.

When asked about the recent decisions in both soot cases, Hirsch said the “remains committed to implementing the Clean Air Act as written and is considering appropriate next steps.” The administration has had more success with smaller deregulatory moves. For example, in mid-July, the DC Circuit reaffirmed the Trump EPA’s approach to how refineries and other industrial facilities calculate their emissions and thus determine what pollution controls are needed. Later that month, the same court ruled to uphold the EPA’s extension of deadlines for steel mills to comply with certain hazardous emissions standards.