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The summer of 2024 will be remembered for many things, but here at the Center for Progressive Reform, what most struck us was that it was the year that the administrative state broke through into public consciousness. From the unexpected virality of, and backlash against, Project 2025 — a massive right-wing legal manifesto as aggressive as it was arcane — to the Supreme Court regulatory rulings that made headlines for weeks, this year’s political news drove home that the work we do to protect the environment, the workforce, and public health matters very much to we, the people when these things are under attack. In this context, we approach the task of inviting new members to join us in our work with seriousness, but also with much excitement. This spring, we reviewed nearly two dozen exceptional candidates from the fields of law and public policy. Today, we are pleased to announce that we have a cohort of three excellent scholars to add to our ranks.

Last Friday, the D.C. Circuit issued a two-page opinion refusing to stay a regulation. The D.C. Circuit frequently denies stays, but this ruling was notable for three reasons: It allows an important climate change regulation to go into effect; it clarifies an important legal doctrine; and it has a good chance of being upheld on appeal — even though the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a previous regulation on the same subject.

The American public is lucky to have the federal administrative state. Every day, it protects all of us from harms like heavily polluted air, consistently contaminated drinking water, and dangerous workplaces. It strengthens our democracy. And it ensures a fairer, healthier, and more inclusive economy. The good news is that the self-aggrandizing U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce does not change that. And that is because it cannot change that.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed June 24 to hear a case about whether environmental impact statements need to address climate change. To read the arguments made about the case, you’d think that this was a common law area where courts establish the rules. But as I discuss in a forthcoming article, recent amendments have put a lot of flesh on the previously barebones law. The bottom line: The Supreme Court shouldn’t give advocates of narrowing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) a victory that they were unable to get through the legislative process.

Deep in the heart of state and regional environmental and energy agencies, engineers, economists, scientists, and lawyers are working hard to develop comprehensive climate action plans (CCAPs). Created by the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) program is funding a range of state and subnational planning and implementation measures, including the CCAPs, which are due in 2025. In our recent issue brief, Comprehensive Climate Action Plans: What’s a Greenhouse Gas Reduction “Measure”?, we explore a key question: What is the nature of the “actions” that planners should include in their climate action plans? Or, to use the program’s term, what’s a climate “measure?”

States like California face sobering budget shortfalls, and their governors and legislatures are grappling with how and where to make cuts. These debates cast a spotlight on the critical importance of state budgets to an equitable clean energy future.

The bad news is that we’re not yet on track to avoid dangerous climate change. But there’s also good news: We’ve taken important steps that will ease further progress. We should resist the allure of easy optimism, given the scale of the challenges. Neither should we wallow in despair. There’s a good basis for hope.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued a cluster of new rules designed to limit carbon emissions from power generators. Once upon a time, the presumption would have been that the rules would quietly go into effect, until someday a court rules on their validity. These days, we can expect a lot of action to begin almost right away.

In West Virginia v. EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. The heart of the ruling was that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had engaged in a power grab, basing an unprecedented expansion of its regulatory authority on an obscure provision of the statute. Conservative groups have claimed since then that virtually every government regulation raises a major question. But the doctrine cannot be read that broadly. In particular, the doctrine does not apply to the emission standards for cars that EPA issued last week. As EPA explains in its prologue to the rule, the car standard is very different from the Clean Power Plan.