(WASHINGTON) — Environmental nonprofits are gearing up to challenge some of the actions President Donald Trump has issued since taking office.
There is litigation coming for the majority of the executive orders Trump has signed so far that affect the environment, conservation and decarbonizing the economy, several nonprofits told ABC News.
Environmental lawyers are also on standby for any directives issued in the future that could violate existing environmental laws, according to several sources familiar with the lawsuits already being prepared against the Trump administration.
The White House did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
How environmental groups are responding to Trump’s executive orders
Trump began his second term as president by signing a slew of executive actions, including an order that attempts to revoke action taken by President Joe Biden in the last weeks of his term to ban all future offshore oil and natural gas drilling on America’s East and West coasts, the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Bering Sea.
While Trump immediately vowed to reverse the ban when it was signed on Jan. 6, that could prove difficult. The law Biden invoked, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, was written so a presidential action under its authority is permanent — providing legal precedent to ensure it stands, several environmental lawyers told ABC News, describing Trump’s move as illegal.
“We’ll see them in court at some point,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think we will prevail on this.”
Trump’s vow to revoke the ban is an attempt to fulfill his campaign promise to increase fossil fuel production, Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm, told ABC News.
In doing so, he is ignoring a large swath of U.S. coastline communities who would prefer for drilling to decrease, said Joanne Spalding, director of the environmental law program at the Sierra Club.
“People in Florida don’t want drilling. People in California don’t want drilling,” Spalding told ABC News. “There’s lots of places where people are not interested in having that activity on their coastlines.”
Existing environmental laws could also serve as roadblocks as Trump aims to increase the amount of federal land that will be subject to drilling, the experts said.
Separately, groups criticized Trump’s planned 10-to-1 deregulatory freeze, which would require the federal government to repeal 10 existing rules, regulations or guidance documents in order to adopt a new one, as “completely arbitrary,” Spalding said.
That order is “almost verbatim” to a two-for-one deregulatory freeze issued in 2017 that “never amounted to anything,” Hartl said.
“A lot of what we’ve seen, even in the first two weeks, have been almost just copy-and-paste activities from executive orders that we saw in the first Trump administration,” he said.
What worries conservation nonprofits the most
The potential dismantling of several federal agencies that conduct important work for conservation is a concern for environmental groups.
The Office of Management and Budget Office’s move to suspend federal financial aid programs could be a warning sign for federal agencies that conduct environmental work that does not align with Trump’s agenda, Hartl said.
“Right now, the biggest threat to the environment is Trump’s across-the-board attempt to simply dismantle the federal government,” he said.
In addition, the presence of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and DOGE head Elon Musk’s buyout offer to millions of federal employees could severely disrupt the conservation work of several agencies, he added.
“If you don’t have people working at the EPA, it’s pretty hard to keep the air clean, the water clean,” Hartl said. “If you don’t have folks working at the National Park Service, how are you going to run your national parks? How are you going to protect endangered wildlife?”
In addition, the potential defunding of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act — both by enacted by Biden — poses serious setbacks for decarbonizing the country’s economy and moving toward a net-zero economy by 2050, environmental advocates said. Both are “the most important pieces of legislation ever in addressing global climate change,” Spalding said.
As part of his executive actions, Trump temporarily suspended the disbursement of funds from the IRA. Sankar said that has worried NGOs because the money is intended to advance the development of a clean energy economy as well as improve public health and support communities that bore the brunt of the impact of the fossil fuel economy.
“We are looking at and developing lawsuits aimed at ensuring that the money flows to the intended recipients,” he said.
Several lawsuits challenging the authority of DOGE are also being prepared, according to the groups.
Lessons learned from the 1st Trump administration
Many of Trump’s declarations are relatively symbolic or declare an intention but don’t necessarily constitute any actual action, environmental law experts said.
“Trump likes just holding up his signature, and that’s the main reason we we see him doing these flurry of executive orders,” Hartl said, adding that a lot of Trump’s actions were not effective during the first term.
Along with the executive orders comes rumor and speculation about what they actually can achieve, which makes it difficult for nonprofits to take immediate action, Sankar said.
Because of this, environmental groups may be more selective this time around about which executive actions they actually decide to take to court — especially since nonprofits don’t have endless resources to challenge every order, Spalding said.
“We’re always very choosy about our litigation to make sure that we have the best claims with the clients who are most clearly affected,” Sankar said.
This time around, environmental lawyers will be more savvy about responses, Spalding said.
“We’ll continue to focus on those priorities and make sure that we’re engaged every step of the way during the regulatory rollback process,” she said.
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