Trump administration illegally weakened air pollution protections, judge rules

The Trump administration has illegally weakened national protections against air pollution from soot, the tiny particles released by motor vehicles, power plants and factories that can cause fatal heart and lung diseases, a Bay Area federal judge says.

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden strengthened standards for soot pollution in February 2024, and the law required President Donald Trump's EPA to report two years later on which areas of the nation were failing to meet those standards.

Instead, the EPA sought to repeal the Biden standards – an effort rejected three weeks ago by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. – and claimed it would not be able to issue a compliance report until at least early 2028.

In a ruling issued late Friday, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam of Oakland rejected the EPA's timetable and ordered the agency to issue stricter pollution standards by next February, enabling states to set new rules to reduce soot emissions.

States and environmental groups have already collected most of the necessary information, and "EPA's delinquency" does not justify further delays, said Gilliam, who was appointed by President Barack Obama.

He said Trump administration officials have not disputed environmental advocates' assessment that their inaction "will cause serious harm to the breathing public and to the environment," resulting in "more asthma attacks, hospitalizations, lost workdays, emergency room visits, and premature deaths." 

Environmental groups were relieved.

"EPA's own scientists found that implementing the soot standard would save 4,500 lives each year while also preventing hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and emergency room visits – as well as cases of lung cancer, heart disease and dementia," Richard Yates, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement.

Another group, Earthjustice, said its analysis of EPA data last December found that 75 million people, more than one-fifth of the nation's population, lived in counties where air pollution from soot exceeded current national standards.

Matthew Nies, a spokesperson for the Trump administration's Justice Department, declined to comment Monday. The administration could challenge the ruling in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and later in the Supreme Court. In a June 15 filing with Gilliam's court, Justice Department attorney Rachel Martinez argued that the EPA was entitled to "sovereign immunity" from the lawsuit by environmental groups.

Trump's EPA, joined by industry groups and a group of Republican-led states, argued in a separate case that President Joe Biden's administration lacked authority to issue the current soot-pollution standards.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled June 26 that Biden's EPA had acted within its authority under a federal law requiring the agency to conduct "a thorough review of the existing criteria and standards every five years and to revise them if appropriate," to make sure that national air quality standards "do not fall too far behind the evolving scientific evidence." 

The author of the ruling, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. The challengers could seek review in the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has narrowed federal agencies' authority to restrict pollution and climate change.

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