Trump and California Are Set To Duke It Out Over Environmental Policy Again

During Trump's first term, California filed numerous lawsuits seeking to halt deregulation.

California was one of President Donald Trump's largest foes during his first term; the state sued his administration over 120 times. Lawsuits from the Golden State impeded several of Trump's deregulatory moves, including attempts to curb regulations regarding methane emissions from landfills and fracking on federal lands.

Then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra also led a coalition of 22 states in challenging the Trump administration's final rule to modernize the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The first significant overhaul of the law in decades, the rule set hard page and time limits for completing an environmental review and was designed to streamline permitting in the United States. While the lawsuit did not reverse the rule, the NEPA modernization was ultimately rescinded when President Joe Biden took office.

With Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom calling on the state Legislature to create a $25 million reserve account for litigation, California is ready to play spoiler again. This could spell trouble for Trump's goals to increase oil and gas drilling on federal land, roll back Biden-era pollution controls at fossil fuel power plants, and reverse stringent greenhouse gas standards for vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration could also hamstring many of Newsom's climate change and clean energy projects by clawing back federal funding for subsidies and slow-walking approval for some of the state's clean air initiatives. California is the only state currently allowed to set its own air pollution standards for new vehicles, but it must first obtain a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In December, the EPA approved two California waiver requests, including its rule mandating that 100 percent of cars sold in the state be zero emission by 2035. The Trump administration could try to reverse this decision, as it did in 2019 when the EPA rescinded a previously approved waiver that allowed California to implement its own vehicle emissions standards for model year 2022–2025 cars. (Biden reinstated the waiver.)

Repealing California's waiver would have national implications. As of August, 2024, 17 states and the District of Columbia have implemented some subset of California's vehicle emissions standards. These states and California accounted for more than 40 percent of new vehicle sales in 2023, according to the Congressional Research Service.

A second round of Trump vs. California will have significant impacts on taxpayers—Californians alone paid $42 million for Trump-related litigation from 2017 to 2022—and businesses, which have to stay in compliance even as regulatory standards ping-pong from administration to administration. Trump's second term provides Congress an opportunity to stop this chaos by implementing stable regulations that shrink the size of government and allow the private sector to meet the country's economic and environmental needs.