Judges curbed rollbacks during Trump’s first term. But the courts and the law have changed thanks to Trump’s own appointments. Those votes will be critical as his team seeks to erase the legal basis for climate action in his second term.
Federal Courts Divided, So Far,
on Trump’s Environmental Retreat
Marianne Lavelle / Inside Climate News
(November 4, 2025) — In President Donald Trump’s first term, the federal courts helped put the brakes on his administration’s retreat on environmental protection.
Nine months into the second Trump term, the courts appear divided on whether to allow the administration’s far more aggressive dismantling of policy on climate change, clean energy and environmental justice.
In the 14 environmental policy cases so far in which there have been rulings on legal issues, the outcomes appear to be roughly even, with six clear wins for the Trump administration, five for the challengers and three mixed decisions, according to an Inside Climate News analysis. But in the Trump administration’s six victories, there’s an ominous sign: Three came when U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal overturned lower court rulings. That means that as of Nov. 4, all of the appeals court decisions in environmental cases have gone the president’s way.
The most important appellate panel—the Supreme Court—has yet to weigh in on any environmental cases from Trump’s second term. But emergency orders the high court has issued on other issues—education and health, for example—portend trouble for the many lawsuits over the Trump administration’s wholesale termination of environmental justice grants.
The case outcomes are a sign that the environmental law battles of Trump’s second term will be different from those of his first term. They are playing out in federal courts that he has shaped with 251 appointments (his nominees hold 28 percent of 870 judgeships on courts established under Article III of the Constitution). And in the years Trump was out of office, his judicial appointees helped transform the laws governing federal regulation, giving agency decision-makers less deference and narrowing the scope of their authority.
The changes have emboldened Trump’s second-term team leaders, like Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, to push the envelope, including with a bid to rescind his agency’s authority to address climate change.
But all of the second-term court rulings so far have been on preliminary issues—mainly whether to put a hold on Trump administration actions while core case issues, such as constitutionality, are decided. Moreover, in the vast majority of environmental cases involving the Trump administration, there have been no substantive rulings so far.
“It’s far too early to tell how they’ll go,” said Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “The three where the courts have denied preliminary injunctions have gotten attention, but it’s only three” out of a much larger number of cases, he said. Gerrard compiled a list of environmental cases for Inside Climate News, based in part on the Sabin Center’s Climate Litigation Tracker.
Even if the second Trump administration is a more challenging legal environment, environmental advocates and Democratic state attorneys general are pushing forward with litigation, arguing that Zeldin and other Trump policymakers have overplayed their legal hand. And they maintain there’s reason to believe the courts ultimately will curb Trump rollbacks, especially on important regulatory issues, like the proposed repeal of the EPA’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions, that are yet to be finalized and litigated.
A Changed Legal Landscape
Records show challengers were successful in holding back many of the first Trump administration’s gambits to roll back environmental protection. One advocacy group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, says it sued the first Trump administration 163 times, winning nearly 90 percent of its cases. NRDC’s suits helped put a stop to the first Trump administration’s effort to restart the Keystone XL pipeline, to open areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic oceans to drilling and to eliminate energy efficiency standards.
The litigation tracker of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, which zeroed in on regulatory disputes, showed that 76 percent of 135 court cases over agency environment, energy and natural resources rules were decided against the Trump administration between 2017 and 2021. Courts in those cases, for example, determined that the Trump EPA failed to follow the law in its weakening of rules on the potent greenhouse gases known as HFCs, on its handling of toxic wastewater discharges from power plants and in its delay of rules on methane emissions from landfills.
The current array of environmental policy cases is quite different from the mix in Trump’s first term, reflecting how much policy he has sought to make through executive action, without resorting to the formal regulatory and deregulatory process. For example, there are four challenges related to Trump’s executive orders to halt offshore wind energy development before the courts—and in one of those cases, the Revolution Wind project off Rhode Island succeeded in getting an injunction lifting Trump’s stop-work order and allowing it to resume construction.
Trump’s assertion of executive authority on renewables decision-making cuts both ways; the administration has been sued by two anti-wind-energy groups over its decision to allow another offshore project, Empire Wind, to proceed. A U.S. district judge in Washington, D.C. ruled on Oct. 23 in favor of the Trump administration, which is a win for Empire Wind.
A district judge in Washington state has blocked, for now, the Trump plan to suspend the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure charging network, known as NEVI. And a district judge in New York ruled that New York City’s new congestion pricing program should be allowed to go into effect while litigation over whether Trump has power to stop it proceeds.
Although the cases are varied, observers see common threads in the executive actions at issue.
“The theme that runs throughout is they’re doing everything they can to maximize both the supply of and the demand for fossil fuels,” Gerrard said.
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