The Foundation Block
The Trump administration will revoke the scientific finding that underpins nearly all U.S. climate regulation this week, eliminating in a single action what courts have spent 18 years upholding. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding the 2009 endangerment finding, a government declaration that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. This finding serves as the legal foundation for climate regulations under the Clean Air Act, from auto emissions standards to power plant rules to protections against what the finding identifies as climate change threats including deadly floods, extreme heat waves, and catastrophic wildfires. By attacking the scientific premise rather than individual regulations, the administration has found a way to dismantle an entire regulatory architecture that courts have consistently protected.
EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch called the Obama-era endangerment finding "one of the most damaging decisions in modern history," a characterization that reveals how the Trump administration views the scientific declaration itself as harmful rather than the climate impacts it addresses. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the revocation as part of broader "deregulatory actions to unleash American energy dominance and drive down costs." EPA head Lee Zeldin argued that Democrats "created the endangerment finding to regulate segments of the economy and that it costs Americans money," recasting a scientific determination as a political tool. The language from administration officials consistently treats the finding not as an empirical assessment but as a policy choice subject to reversal.
The Strategic Bypass
The decision to revoke the endangerment finding represents a fundamental shift in deregulation strategy. Rather than challenge individual climate regulations through the courts, where legal efforts have uniformly failed since 2007, the administration is eliminating the scientific foundation that supports all of them simultaneously. This approach sidesteps the need to prove that specific regulations are economically burdensome or legally flawed. Instead, it declares invalid the underlying scientific premise that greenhouse gases endanger public health, effectively arguing that if there is no danger, there is no basis for protection.
The strategy creates a direct collision with established judicial precedent. The Supreme Court ruled in 2007's Massachusetts vs. EPA that greenhouse gases caused by burning oil and other fossil fuels are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. That decision established the legal framework requiring EPA to make a scientific determination about whether these gases endanger public health. The endangerment finding, issued two years later in 2009, answered that question affirmatively based on scientific evidence. For the executive branch to now revoke that finding means declaring that what the Supreme Court identified as pollutants requiring regulatory assessment do not, in fact, pose the danger that scientific review determined they pose.
This contradiction exposes a critical vulnerability in how American environmental protection works. The entire structure of climate regulation rests on a scientific finding that, despite 18 years of consistent court support, can apparently be erased through executive action. The endangerment finding was never intended as permanent law passed by Congress but as a scientific determination made by an executive agency. What one administration declares based on scientific evidence, another can revoke by declaring that evidence invalid or improperly applied. The regulatory protections built on that foundation, no matter how many times courts have upheld them, become vulnerable to collapse if the foundation itself is removed.
The Promised Benefits and Predicted Costs
The Trump administration frames the revocation as economic liberation. President Trump previously called climate change a "hoax" and issued an executive order directing EPA to submit a report on "the legality and continuing applicability" of the endangerment finding, signaling that this week's action represents the culmination of a deliberate strategy rather than an impulsive decision. Zeldin has criticized Democratic administrations for being "willing to bankrupt the country" in efforts to combat climate change, positioning climate regulation as an existential economic threat. The administration's stated goal centers on reducing costs for Americans by eliminating regulations they characterize as overly restrictive and economically damaging.
Environmental advocates predict the opposite outcome. Peter Zalzal, a lawyer and associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, stated that revoking the finding will encourage "more climate pollution, higher health insurance and fuel costs, and thousands of avoidable premature deaths." This prediction directly contradicts the administration's promise of lower costs, suggesting that eliminating pollution controls will shift expenses from regulated industries to individuals through higher healthcare costs and climate-related damages. Environmental groups describe the shift as "the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal efforts to address climate change," framing it not as regulatory relief but as the dismantling of public health protection.
The competing claims about costs reveal fundamentally different accounting methods. The administration focuses on compliance costs borne by industries subject to emissions regulations, treating these as pure economic loss. Environmental advocates include health costs from increased pollution, infrastructure costs from climate impacts, and premature deaths as economic factors that regulation prevents. Whether revoking the endangerment finding "drives down costs" depends entirely on whose costs count and over what timeframe they are measured. The administration's approach treats the costs of regulation as real and immediate while dismissing the costs of climate impacts as speculative or distant.
The Legal Gauntlet
Legal challenges to the revocation are certain, according to sources familiar with the matter, but the path those challenges will take reveals another systemic vulnerability. Courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the endangerment finding since the Supreme Court's 2007 decision established that greenhouse gases are pollutants requiring regulatory assessment. Those challenges argued that the finding was scientifically flawed, economically unjustified, or procedurally improper. Courts rejected each argument, creating nearly two decades of precedent supporting the finding's validity. The new legal question is whether an administration can simply revoke what courts have repeatedly validated.
The revocation will likely force courts to address the scope of executive power over scientific determinations. EPA issued the endangerment finding based on scientific evidence about greenhouse gas impacts, following the Supreme Court's direction to make such an assessment. If EPA now revokes that finding, the agency must either claim the scientific evidence has changed or that the original interpretation of that evidence was wrong. Given that climate science has only strengthened since 2009, with more evidence of warming and its impacts, the revocation would effectively argue that the same or stronger evidence now supports the opposite conclusion. Courts will need to decide whether agencies have the authority to reverse scientific findings based on political preference rather than changed evidence.
The legal battle will also test whether regulatory protections have any permanence in American governance. Conservatives and some congressional Republicans have long sought to undo climate regulations they consider overly restrictive, but those efforts focused on changing the rules through legislation or challenging them in court. Revoking the endangerment finding represents a different approach: eliminating the scientific basis for regulation through executive action, making the question of whether specific regulations are justified irrelevant because the danger they address is declared nonexistent. If this approach succeeds, it establishes that scientific findings underlying any regulatory framework can be revoked when administrations change, regardless of court precedent or scientific consensus.
The New Instability
The endangerment finding's precarious position reveals a broader pattern in American institutional design. Like the healthcare systems that create preventable blindness through fragmented coverage, or the security guarantees that can be abandoned after 77 years, the climate regulatory framework was built on a foundation that can be removed with a single executive decision. The finding was always vulnerable because it was never codified into law by Congress. Instead, it exists as an agency determination that, despite consistent court validation, remains subject to reversal by the agency that issued it.
This vulnerability transforms scientific findings from empirical baselines into political positions. When the endangerment finding was issued in 2009, it represented EPA's scientific assessment that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare based on available evidence. That assessment has been tested and upheld in courts for 18 years. By revoking it, the Trump administration treats the finding not as a scientific conclusion subject to verification or refutation through evidence, but as a policy choice subject to reversal through political preference. The distinction matters because it changes what scientific findings mean in American governance. If they are empirical determinations, they should change only when evidence changes. If they are political positions, they change when administrations change.
The certain legal challenges will determine whether foundational scientific assessments have any stability in American democracy. The courts that uniformly rejected challenges to the endangerment finding did so because the scientific evidence supported it and EPA followed proper procedures in issuing it. Those courts will now face the question of whether an agency can revoke a scientifically supported finding that courts have repeatedly validated, simply because a new administration disagrees with the regulatory consequences. The answer will establish whether attacking foundational science, rather than debating policy built on that science, has become a viable blueprint for dismantling regulatory systems. What happens to the endangerment finding will reveal whether any scientific determination underlying American governance can be considered settled, or whether all such findings are now understood as temporary positions lasting only until political winds shift.