Trump's Attacks on the Environment Aren't Just Bad Policy, They're Illegal
The Trump administration’s misguided attempt to weaken rules that protect our air, water and public lands is meeting stiff resistance in the courts — a powerful check on a president who tries to skirt the law at every turn.
Four times in recent weeks, federal courts have smacked down these reckless efforts to roll back environmental protections and rapped the administration for rushing to change policy without providing even the most basic legal reasoning. Those decisions echo what other judges have held: this Administration can’t short-circuit the regulatory process.
When it comes to defending his agenda in court, Trump has one of the worst records of any modern president. He’s lost more than 90 percent of the time, according to the Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank sponsored by the New York University School of Law. And when it comes to the environment, these rulings have been a major roadblock to the administration’s destructive policies that seek to satisfy corporate interests at the expense of natural resources.
The latest decision came April 19 when a federal judge in Montana said officials at the Interior Department had neglected an environmental review of its decision to resume coal sales from U.S. public lands, ruling that officials willfully ignored the environmental effects of selling huge volumes of coal from public lands.
Before that, a California judge struck down the Interior Department’s repeal of an Obama administration rule on coal valuation that was meant to increase revenue for taxpayers. In her blistering opinion, U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong said the Interior Department committed “serious violations” of the law and found the repeal was done “in a wholly improper manner.”
And in March, Trump suffered two setbacks in Alaska after a federal judge ruled that the administration had no legal basis to reverse a ban on offshore drilling in parts of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, and further rejected plans to build a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. In the latter case, U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason said former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrongly dismissed years of data when he arbitrarily decided to allow the road project to move forward.
These rebukes share a common theme: the administration’s repeated failure to explain why its actions were justified under the law, and a callous disregard for following the legal process required to change critical policies.
In one of the biggest losses for Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a federal appeals court last year ordered the administration to immediately put into effect the Chemical Disaster Rule, an Obama-era safety measure crafted in response to a 2013 explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant that killed 15 people. The court said the administration had no authority to delay the rule by 20 months. A similar ruling last year said the EPA could not delay a regulation limiting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities.
Another ruling in August ordered the EPA to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to major health problems in children. Under former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the agency had tried to derail the ban in response to lobbying by the chemical industry. But a federal appeals court in California said the EPA failed to consider scientific evidence showing the harms the pesticide caused in children.
This dismal record comes as no surprise given the constant chaos, scandals, and impulsive decision-making that are hallmarks of Trump’s tenure. Pruitt resigned after months of ethics controversies, while former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke left office under his own cloud of corruption.
And more problems appear to be around the corner. Zinke’s successor, David Bernhardt, now boasts the dubious distinction of being Trump’s most conflicted cabinet member and is already facing multiple investigations just days after his confirmation.
Dozens of other legal challenges on environmental actions are now pending in courts around the country. One of the most important cases is a challenge to Trump’s removal of more than two million acres from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, a move that culminated in the largest elimination of protected areas in U.S. history. In those two cases, the court will decide whether Trump’s actions were legal. So far more than 100 legal scholars have written that only Congress has the authority to downsize national monuments.
Trump’s response to these decisions, and others, has been to lash out with unfair and outrageous attacks on the reputation of federal judges. Yet these rulings against him have come from judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. So long as his administration continues to act with reckless disregard for the laws, the courts will continue calling him out.
Marc Rehmann is the senior campaign manager for the Law of the Land Project at the Center for American Progress. Sam Hananel is an associate director of media relations at the Center.
