Project 2025 Calls for Repeal of the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding: Dismantling the Legal Foundation for Climate Action

The 2009 Endangerment Finding was not a policy preference; it was a scientific determination by EPA that greenhouse gases 'may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health and welfare,' rooted in the Clean Air Act and affirmed by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007). Project 2025 proposes repealing it, which would erase the legal architecture that compelled decades of climate rules—fuel economy standards, power plant carbon limits, methane controls—and leave the EPA with no authority to regulate the primary driver of climate change. This is not deregulation; it is a proposed legal and procedural retreat that, by design, would prevent any future administration from acting without restarting the entire multi-year rulemaking process.

Communities already choking on pollution—disproportionately Black, Brown, and low-income neighborhoods near refineries, highways, and power plants—would lose the one federal tool that promised to cut both greenhouse gases and the co-pollutants that cause asthma, heart attacks, and premature death. Without the finding, EPA cannot set national standards that reduce emissions across sectors. The 31 deregulatory actions announced in March 2025, if the finding were repealed, would gain permanent immunity from future restoration unless Congress acts or a new administration re-issues the finding—a process that would take years and face immediate legal challenge.

Environmental justice experts, building on Robert Bullard's foundational work, have long documented that pollution burdens fall heaviest on communities of color. Repealing the Endangerment Finding would institutionalize that inequity by removing the federal government's primary mechanism to address it. As Leah Stokes's research on policy sequencing shows, once a legal foundation like the endangerment finding is removed, rebuilding it requires an enormous political and scientific effort—time the climate crisis does not allow.