Following up on Susan’s blog last week on the status of the Risk Management Program regulations, there was an informative article in the Washington Post last week that outlined the difficulty the Trump Administration is having in defending against arbitrary and capricious rulemaking challenges to its regulatory rollback efforts under the Administrative Procedure Act or APA (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-real-reason-president-trump-is-constantly-losing-in-court/2019/03/19/f5ffb056-33a8-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html?utm_term=.c64f1538f5ac).
According to the Washington Post, “[f]ederal judges have ruled against the Trump Administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters. In case after case, judges have rebuked Trump officials for failing to follow the most basic rules of governance for shifting policy, including providing legitimate explanations supported by facts and, where required, public input.” A case-by-case deeper dive into those 63 decisions where the federal courts have ruled against the regulatory rollbacks is found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/trump-overruled/?utm_term=.3dcc2e6a7c06, including information about the 17 environmental decisions that have overruled rollback or delay of environmental regulations.
As noted during my Environmental Bootcamp presentations, environmental regulatory standards are in significant flux and keeping up with the status of environmental regulations is daunting to say the least. After all, to properly assess your environmental compliance status, you not only have to track the Federal Register for new proposed and final rules, you also have to stay up-to-date with the status of various rulemaking challenges in federal court. At our Environmental Regulatory Bootcamp, we always provide updates on the latest environmental regulatory developments and, better yet, provide you with the tools for you to track these regulatory changes yourself going forward.