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On February 25, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) issued an interim final rule (IFR) rescinding the CEQ regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). On March 27, we submitted a comment, along with 25 other professors, identifying the severe challenges this rescission will create for critical infrastructure projects and other important federal activities.

It is no coincidence that since taking office on Martin Luther King Day, the Trump administration’s most aggressive actions have targeted historically marginalized groups. In fact, the many blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, and bizarre actions we saw during the first month of Trump 2.0 — during which we also observed National Black History Month — are specifically harmful to Black Americans.

President Donald Trump seeks to halt Congress’ support for tax credits, grants, and loans that are supporting a transition to clean transportation, a transition necessary to achieving public health standards and reducing the transportation sector’s substantial contribution to increasingly catastrophic climate change. It will be up to Congress to stand up to the president’s pressure and preserve its support for critical environmental and economic investments.

President Donald Trump’s attack on electric vehicles threatens not only the nation’s progress in fighting climate change, but torpedoes our ability to achieve healthy air. The Inauguration Day executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” calls for eliminating the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate” and “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government distortions that favor EVs ….” Slowing our transition to clean vehicles will have the worst consequences for vulnerable frontline communities living near highways, ports, and warehouses, communities that already experience a disproportionate share of environmental harms.

The second Trump administration’s disastrous early-term actions do nothing to address the economic inequality that our political classes have long ignored. In its first two weeks, the administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, reversed federal initiatives on environmental justice, withheld public health information, frozen spending on environmental and climate mitigation programs, threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, and just recently threatened to fire more than 1,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers who focus on climate and environmental enforcement.

A sleeper provision in one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders attempts to revolutionize the way the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) operates and cut environmental review to a minimum.

On December 11, 2024, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, 40 folks attended the first annual rural clean energy convening co-sponsored by the Center for Progressive Reform and the Center for Energy Education. Attendees included FEMA representatives, USDA and other government agency officials, local residents, county commissioners, and energy policy advocates. The main topic of the […]

The U.S. Congress is back and the U.S. House of Representatives is already roiling, as exemplified by the lobbyists and pundits who trail members and staff through the halls and into their offices. Republicans are already desperate to regain momentum after tripping out of the starting gate, even astride their newly minted control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue—a “trifecta” in Washington lexicon. Many backroom negotiations are inevitable, and the idea that a massive legislative package will be easier to pass could run into the reality that members will want innumerable concessions to take tough votes. The process will bog down, and Republicans must find something else to do. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has already fingered the most promising possibility—killing Biden Administration rules under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The CRA allows narrow majorities in Congress to pass “resolutions of disapproval” for recently issued final rules.

They say that history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. As in many sequels, there will be many things we’ve seen before. Much of that consisted of an all-out attack on environmental law. If you hated the original, you won’t enjoy watching the same thing the second time around. But there are a few additions to the cast and some new backdrops on the set. Today, I’m going to talk about some areas of continuity.