As president, Donald Trump’s sweeping attempts to roll back federal environmental regulations were often stymied — by the courts, by a lack of experience, even by internal resistance from government employees.
But if he retakes the White House in November, Mr. Trump would be in a far better position to dismantle environmental and climate rules, aided by more sympathetic judges and conservative allies who are already mapping out ways to bend federal agencies to the president’s will.
“It’s going to be easier,” said Myron Ebell, who led the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency after Mr. Trump won in 2016. “They’re going to have better people, more committed people, more experienced people. They will be able to move more quickly, and more successfully, in my view.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump has promised to repeal federal regulations designed to cut greenhouse gas pollution that is rapidly heating the planet. Many of his allies want to go further. They are drafting plans to slash budgets, oust career staffers, embed loyalists in key offices and scale back the government’s powers to tackle climate change, regulate industries and restrict hazardous chemicals.
Those plans, while wildly ambitious, may be more attainable next time around. Perhaps the biggest change in Mr. Trump’s favor is that over the past two years, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority has significantly curbed the legal authority of the government to impose environmental rules on businesses.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has proposed reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to fire them. He has said that move, which he tried to implement at the end of his first term, is necessary to “destroy the deep state” that he says secretly worked against his presidency. The result is that a second Trump administration might not face as many legal or bureaucratic guardrails as the first.
“Because of the Supreme Court in particular, he’ll be able to get away with a lot more than anyone ever suspected,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who led the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush. She said the courts have effectively given a second Trump administration a “free hand” to slash regulations.
That could mean a drastic transformation of the E.P.A., which was created by a Republican, Richard Nixon, and for five decades has played a powerful role in American society, from forcing communities to reduce smog to regulating the use of pesticides. Businesses and conservative groups have long said that excessive regulation drives up costs for industries from electric utilities to home building. Environmentalists say that handcuffing the E.P.A. now, when time is short to contain global warming, could have dire consequences.
A significant weakening of the E.P.A., said Ms. Whitman, is “going to be devastating for the country and the world, frankly, because we all suffer from climate change.”
Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement that “President Trump made America a net exporter of energy for the first time because he cut red tape and gave the industry more freedom to do what they do best — utilize the liquid gold under our feet.” If elected, he would “cancel Joe Biden’s radical mandates, terminate the Green New Scam, and make America energy independent again,” she said.
In 2023, the United States pumped more crude oil than any other nation in history and it is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas.
Rolling back regulations
Mr. Trump doesn’t detail his plans for the E.P.A., apart from promising to scrap two major Biden administration regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gases from power plants and cars. His allies, however, have laid out specific proposals as part of a transition plan known as Project 2025, spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
While Mr. Trump has recently sought to distance himself from Project 2025, much of the plan was written by people who were top advisers during his first term and could serve in prominent roles if he wins in November.
In a 32-page section on the E.P.A., the plan takes aim at the agency’s authority to tackle global warming, including by revisiting a 2009 scientific finding that says carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health. The blueprint also calls for repealing regulations governing air pollution from factories that crosses state borders and for reconsidering limits on PFAS, toxic compounds known as “forever chemicals” that have been detected in nearly half the nation’s tap water.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating E.P.A.’s office of environmental justice, which focuses on reducing pollution in low-income and minority areas;breaking up an office dedicated to children’s health; resetting scientific advisory boards “to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints”; and appointing a political loyalist as the agency’s science adviser in order to “reform” the agency’s research.
“To implement policies that are consistent with a conservative EPA, the agency will have to undergo a major reorganization,” reads the section on the E.PA., which was written by Mandy Gunasekara, the agency’s chief of staff during the Trump administration. Ms. Gunasekara didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has also spoken of his desire to get rid of federal employees who might oppose him. Project 2025 proposes that the E.P.A. look for “relocation opportunities” for certain senior employees. As president, Mr. Trump relocated one agency within the Interior Department from Washington, D.C. to Colorado, prompting 87 percent of the affected employees to quit or retire rather than move.
Mr. Trump’s plan for agency staff will be to “vilify them, reclassify them, and then fire them,” said Gina McCarthy, who led the E.P.A. under President Barack Obama.
Project 2025 also recommends installing political appointees in parts of the E.P.A. that have been dedicated to nonpartisan technical and scientific research, like the National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich.
That laboratory, where about 140 engineers, chemists, toxicologists, lawyers and economists study vehicle performance and emissions standards, is “the last word on automobile pollution,” said William K. Reilly, who led the E.P.A. under President George H.W. Bush. “If political people are put in there we will find we have destroyed one of the greatest achievements we have in the government.”
Some E.P.A. employees are already preparing for a Trump presidency. The American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, a union that represents about 8,000 E.P.A. workers, recently secured a new contract provision that allows workers to file a grievance if they face retaliation for their scientific work.
Still, a dramatic reorganization along with new political pressures could drive many career employees to leave, hollowing out the agency, which some say is what a Trump administration would want. “These proposals are basically taking a blender to the agency,” said Marie Owens, president of Council 238. “Frankly, it’s frightening, people are asking, should I leave before all this happens?”
Fewer obstacles
During his four years in office, Mr. Trump tried to roll back or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules, including Obama-era limits on greenhouse gases from power plants and cars and wetlands protections.
But deregulation often proved more challenging than expected.
Scaling back federal regulations is an arduous, time-consuming process that requires agencies to lay out detailed justifications for changing rules, respond to public comments and then defend the moves in federal court. Judges often have little patience for rushed or sloppy work.
In Mr. Trump’s first term, officials sometimes announced they had erased a regulation only to be reversed by the courts because they had skipped important steps. All told, the administration lost 57 percent of cases challenging its environmental policies, a much higher loss rate than previous administrations, according to a database kept by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity.
At various points, courts overturned the Trump administration’s attempts to relax restrictions on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants; blocked a rule that would have limited what scientific studies the E.P.A. could use; and found the administration broke the law when it failed to enact nationwide standards to curb harmful ozone pollution. Judges also rejected attempts to take gray wolves off the endangered species list and to roll back rules that restricted methane leaks from oil and gas wells.
Jason Schwartz, the legal director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks often ignored congressional statutes or inflated the costs of regulations on industry. Mr. Trump’s allies have presumably learned from those missteps, experts said.
“The first Trump administration came in without having been prepared to take over the government,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a former senior E.P.A. official in President George W. Bush’s administration who now works as an energy lawyer for Bracewell LLP. “I don’t think they’ll make the same mistakes again.”
The courts could also prove more sympathetic next time around. With three Supreme Court justices appointed by Mr. Trump, the court now has a conservative supermajority that has shown a deep skepticism toward environmental regulation. The court has sometimes blocked rules that were still being adjudicated in lower courts or before they were implemented.
In June, the Supreme Court overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine, which for 40 years said that courts should defer to government agencies when a law is unclear. That ruling could undercut the regulatory authority of many federal agencies. The Supreme Court also halted E.P.A. rules that limited smokestack pollution blowing across state borders, overturned expanded protections for millions of acres of wetlands and narrowed the agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants.
Thomas J. Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which supports the fossil fuel industry, said the Supreme Court’s decision on Chevron could help a second Trump administration revoke California’s authority to set stricter tailpipe pollution standards than the federal government, which the state is using to phase out sales of gasoline-powered cars in favor of electric models.
A second Trump administration might also find the lower federal courts to be more receptive, after Mr. Trump installed more than 200 conservative judges in his first term. Some of those appointees recently ordered the Biden administration to lift its pause on approvals for natural-gas export terminals and struck down a regulation that would have required states to measure greenhouse gases from transportation.
“It’s a much more favorable judiciary for a new Trump administration and his allies,” said Jody Freeman, director of the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “They’d meet with not just less resistance in the courts, on average, but a certain appetite for doing the things they’d want to do.”
To be sure, experts said a second Trump administration wouldn’t enjoy completely free rein. Many E.P.A. rules, for instance, are litigated in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where two-thirds of current judges were appointed by Democrats. And the Supreme Court’s overturning of Chevron might make it harder in some cases to water down existing regulations, said Mr. Holmstead.
Some Republicans also downplayed the importance of Project 2025, saying that many businesses aren’t eager to gut the E.P.A.
“Industry is no longer debating whether climate change is happening, many are actively working on the energy transition and don’t necessarily want to see climate work at agencies eliminated,” said Samantha Dravis, who served as E.P.A.’s policy chief in the Trump administration.
Environmental groups are preparing to fight. Many say they are studying Project 2025 and mapping out legal arguments that might sway conservative-leaning courts. The Natural Resources Defense Council points out that it won 89 percent of its 163 lawsuits against the first Trump administration.
“The reason we won those cases is because presidents have to follow the law, and that’s not going to change with the election,” said Michael Wall, chief litigation officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund. “We have every reason to think they took lessons from the first term, but it’s also true that we took lessons from their first term.”
Still, many environmentalists say that while they might block some moves, they can’t force a Trump administration to adopt policies that will cut greenhouse gases. And the window to limit global warming to relatively low levels is rapidly closing.
“There’s no skeleton key that’s going to protect everything Biden has accomplished,” said Sam Ricketts, founder of S2 Strategies, a clean-energy consulting group. “I’d love to say that there is a fail-safe plan to protect the gains we’ve made should Trump be president again. There is not.”