Trump’s about to cancel Obama’s most outrageous power grab

President Donald Trump is on the brink of ordering a massive policy shakeup — “the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” says Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin.

When Trump’s EPA orders the end of a 2009 finding that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are a threat to public health, it will halt 16 years of federal efforts to mandate vast changes in American life without legal justification.

The so-called Endangerment Finding led to a host of regulations whose estimated costs exceeded a trillion dollars.

Early in his administration, President Barack Obama tried to get Congress to pass an expansive climate change law.

When the bill stalled, Obama charged ahead with executive action.  

The EPA’s December 2009 Endangerment Finding said that greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

But that law was never meant for such a purpose: It had passed 40 years earlier, before global warming was even a topic of debate.

The Clean Air Act aimed to control a handful of pollutants that posed an immediate danger to public health — think factory smokestacks or exhaust from auto tailpipes.

Greenhouse gases, by contrast, are emitted by almost everything, everywhere — including by humans ourselves, while breathing.

There was and is no clear and legal way to regulate them under the law, leading to years of uncertainty and court challenges.

The greatest effect of the Endangerment Finding was on automobiles.

The Biden administration used it to require the vast majority of new cars and trucks to be electric-powered by 2032, a huge, and hugely expensive, undertaking.  

The American people never voted for one of the nation’s largest industries to be transformed in a decade — but under the Endangerment Finding, the EPA could impose it.

The EPA claimed the new EV mandates would save companies and households money in the long run, due to reduced spending on gasoline.

But as with most energy-efficiency regulations, it never explained why the government had to step in and mandate something so beneficial.

Biden’s EPA waved away objections that many truckers and households would have difficulty spending thousands of extra dollars on electric vehicles.

Trump’s team says withdrawing the finding will save almost $2,500 per automobile.

Even environmentalists know climate change is not top-of-mind for many voters — so they argue EV mandates will reduce other types of automobile emissions that harm public health.

The Sierra Club claims that rolling back the finding will cause thousands more deaths from things like respiratory illnesses and heart attacks.

But assertions about how climate-change mandates improve other aspects of health show the Endangerment Finding’s absurdity.

The Clean Air Act already includes extensive provisions to protect the public from air pollutants, and administrations of all stripes have enforced them.

If Obama or Biden had wanted to further limit automobile pollution, they could have done so directly — not used a roundabout way that Congress did not contemplate.

Like most of Trump’s executive actions, the withdrawal of the Endangerment Finding will be challenged in court.

Environmentalists will argue that the finding was required by an earlier Supreme Court ruling, and that climate change is indeed a threat to public health.

Yet the earlier Supreme Court climate-change ruling underestimated the vast potential it gave to the administrative state to reshape the economy.

Even Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in dissent, thought the effect of the ruling would likely be “symbolic.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Today’s Supreme Court is laser-focused on the dangers imposed by an overreaching administrative state.

In 2022 the justices struck down an effort to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by power plants through the Endangerment Finding, declaring that in the case of a “major question” that affected vast swathes of the economy, Congress would have to clearly authorize any administrative action.

It’s hard to think of more of a major question than regulating greenhouse gases from all cars across the United States.

Although the Supreme Court has at times upbraided Trump for his efforts to rule by executive action, in this case the president is using executive action to reduce the power of the government.

The courts should uphold his Endangerment Finding withdrawal and restore power to Congress, which is supposed to authorize new laws.

The EPA does not, and should not, have such power.

Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.