Blog

The Project 2025 report is 920 pages long, but only a few portions have gotten much public attention. The report’s significance is precisely that it goes beyond a few headline proposals to set a comprehensive agenda for a second Trump administration. There are dozens of significant proposals relating to energy and the environment. Although I can’t talk about all of them here, I want to flag a few of these sleeper provisions. They involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers.

The Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce means that federal courts will have the final say on what an ambiguous federal statute means. What’s not clear is whether most courts will still listen to expert federal agencies in determining which interpretations make the most sense.

The U.S. administrative state does not merely protect Americans against those threats that we are unable to protect ourselves from on our own. It is essential to a healthy economy, it provides a crucial platform for democratic self-government, and it functions as a great social equalizer. All of this is now at risk after the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatives issued four separate decisions largely along ideological lines aimed at eviscerating this crucial institution. The administrative state has been built over the course of nearly 250 years, slowly and pragmatically, since the founding; it has taken just three decision days for the Court to undo much of that work.

How should the United States manage the largest biodiversity conservation system to be greater than the sum of its parts? This vexing question for the national wildlife refuges has received scant attention for the past quarter century. Now the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (Service), which administers the refuge system, has proposed a rule to guide specific refuge decisions to ensure they contribute to a national network rather than incrementally fray the web of conservation.

Fisheries regulation might seem to be unusual grounds for the U.S. Supreme Court to shift power away from federal agencies. But that is what the court seems poised to do in the combined cases of Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce.

In the history of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — which President Richard Nixon signed just over 50 years ago on December 28, 1973 — no creature looms larger than the snail darter. As some lawmakers today seek to weaken the law’s promise to avoid human-caused extinctions, the long-ago battle over this little fish points […]

This summer, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ most significant climate change law. Many advocates for environmental justice, myself included, were disappointed by several features of the Act, including the greenlighting of certain fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, the law unlocked unprecedented streams of investment into clean energy via tax credits and direct spending mechanisms.

If a tree stands in the forest, and there’s no economist around to tabulate its benefits to humans, do those benefits still exist? For government agencies, the answer has long been, “No.” But the Biden administration is poised to change that.

Last month, the Biden administration rolled out the latest piece of its comprehensive Modernizing Regulatory Review initiative: a proposed guidance on how to account for “ecosystem services” in regulatory analysis. As I explained in my comments, if implemented well, this guidance will reinforce the administration’s broader efforts to reprogram an important step in the rulemaking process known as regulatory analysis so that it provides a fairer and fuller picture of the impacts of planned rules.