The U.S. EPA announced 31 actions taken across the agency on Wednesday, potentially clearing away or limiting rules that affect the permitting and operation of thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including waste and recycling facilities.
In a release published Wednesday, EPA said the proposed changes would “roll back trillions in regulatory costs." Some of the actions were previously telegraphed in President Donald Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order, signed on his first day in office. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency was giving power back to the states in a short video address, also released Wednesday.
Like the administration’s efforts to claw back billions of dollars in climate funding, the latest actions are likely to spawn legal challenges.
“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” Zeldin said in a statement.
Many actions are intended to roll back the agency's efforts to address climate change going back more than a decade.
That includes the agency's "endangerment finding," a 2009 decision made by the EPA under President Barack Obama. The decision found that greenhouse gas emissions could endanger public health or welfare and thus should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. It underpins much of the regulations the agency has made to address climate change since.
Several other actions will also likely have consequences on work to address climate change. The EPA plans to roll back the "social cost of carbon" calculation. The Unleashing American Energy executive order had proposed eliminating the calculation "from any Federal permitting or regulatory decision."
First used during the Obama administration, the calculation puts a numerical price on carbon emissions and has been used to make a variety of decisions on pollution. The EPA under Obama had previously set the cost at $42 per ton, and Trump's EPA lowered the cost to less than $5 per ton. The Biden administration raised the price to $190 per ton, the New York Times reported.
The agency also said it would revisit the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which requires reporting from a range of industrial facilities that emit significant climate pollutants. Affected facilities include power plants, landfills, waste incinerators, refineries and a wide range of manufacturing facilities. In total, more than 8,000 facilities are covered under the program.
EPA plans to revisit mandatory reporting requirements for the program, according to a fact sheet.
More than a dozen other actions are aimed at rolling back pollution limits across a range of pollutants and emitters. The agency announced plans to roll back rules on vehicle emissions, for instance, as well as several National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants. It also planned to revisit coal ash and coal combustion residuals standards, including extending federal compliance deadlines.
The agency also confirmed it would shut down its environmental justice and “diversity, equity, and inclusion arms of the agency.”
While many of these actions focused on the language of regulations, the EPA also noted it would be immediately revisiting its enforcement priorities. The National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives, typically renewed every four years, tend to show where the EPA is placing a particular emphasis in its enforcement work. The NECIs were last updated in 2023.
The Biden administration’s listed priorities were mitigating climate change, addressing exposure to PFAS, protecting communities from coal ash contamination, reducing air toxics in overburdened communities, increasing compliance with drinking water standards and chemical accident risk reduction.
The EPA plans to revise its priorities "to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues," according to a release.
Earlier on Wednesday, Zeldin joined officials in announcing the agency would also work with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to revisit the “waters of the United States” rule. The agency plans to modify the rule, which sets protections for wetlands and non-navigable waterways, to reduce permitting costs.
A Supreme Court decision in 2023 previously tightened the rule’s scope, potentially easing restrictions for facilities like landfills that are sited on or near wetlands. EPA officials said the Biden administration did not go far enough in aligning its updated WOTUS definition with that decision.
