Zeldin will have the power to act on both of those—and many more. The vehicle standards could take some time, said Carrie Jenks, executive director of Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. That’s because that rule has already been finalized. “To roll back a final rule,” Jenks explained to me via email, “the Administrative Procedure Act requires an agency to propose a new rule, take public comment, and then finalize that new rule. The agency will have to explain what has changed and why, and the process of proposal, comment, and final rule takes agency resources and time.” That could take two to three years, she said, “and then any litigation starts once the rule is final.”
If the Trump administration haphazardly tries to rush the process, as it did during Trump’s first term, that might help environmental groups’ lawsuits to stop the new rules. The Natural Resources Defense Council has already pledged its readiness to challenge the Trump administration in court. During Trump’s last presidency, chief litigation officer Michael Wall said in a statement last week, “on average, we sued once every ten days for four years, and we won victories in nearly 90% of the resolved cases.”
The methane rule, formally known as the “waste emissions charge,” or WEC, could be reversed more quickly. Because it was only finalized on Tuesday, it’s vulnerable to the Congressional Review Act, which can be used to scrap a rule “finalized within 60 legislative days of the new administration taking office” via a simple congressional majority, Jenks explained. “We saw that used by the Trump administration last time as well as the Biden administration, and I would expect the Trump administration to consider where it can be used again.” Because the methane rule was mandated by the Inflation Reduction Act, “the EPA will continue to have the obligation to implement the WEC (through a different rule) until Congress repeals or alters the methane provisions of the IRA,” Jenks added. But “there are examples of where an agency fails to implement a rule, so that could also be a possible outcome.”
