Environmentalists are bracing for the imminent release of an EPA rule that would gut the agency’s ability to regulate climate pollution.
EPA is poised to finalize its rollback of the endangerment finding — a scientific assertion that undergirds its authority over greenhouse gases — within weeks, or sooner. The move promises to help the Trump administration demolish existing climate rules that force industries to reduce global warming pollution from sources like cars and power plants.
But when and how it will be released are such tightly held secrets that environmental groups have been scouring the travel itinerary of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for signs of a high-profile announcement.
When Zeldin traveled with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to Ohio and Michigan last Friday to highlight new policies they claimed would help cash-strapped consumers and U.S. carmakers save money, advocates saw it as a potential tipoff.
Green groups organized protests and reporter briefings to push back against the repeal, which will make it harder for future administrations to regulate heat-trapping pollution from the likes of cars, airplanes and landfills.
The officials’ Midwest trip was a false alarm. But environmentalists didn’t know that until after they had organized a tactical response.
Climate Action Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups, planned to protest the rollback in front of EPA headquarters in Washington. A coalition spokesperson, Gabrielle Levy, said that plan still stands for whenever the repeal finally drops.
Levy said the swing through the Rust Belt, which included stops at Ford and Stellantis plants, was a potential backdrop for the repeal because it’s tied to environmental rollbacks for cars and trucks.
EPA and the White House have stakeholder meetings scheduled through Feb. 5 to discuss the endangerment finding — which could indicate that the rule won’t be released until after then.
“The OMB‘s outside stakeholder meeting schedule is usually a reliable, but not ironclad, predictor of when they expect review to be completed,” said Joe Goffman, EPA’s air chief under former President Joe Biden. While EPA sometimes cancels a meeting to bring a rule out early, he said, it’s “not been that frequent.”
But the Trump administration often abandons norms.
“What we’ve found with rules so far this administration is that they don’t always keep these meetings,” said Levy, whose group is scheduled to meet with the Office of Management and Budget and EPA about the rule Monday. “They do it when they do it.”
The agency has been successful in preventing leaks on both substance and process. Three former EPA officials attribute that in part to the fact that very few career officials are believed to be working on the repeal.
“People aren’t even really sure who’s preparing it,” said one former official who was granted anonymity to talk about internal discussions.
A team of career lawyers and technical experts would usually be involved, but only a few attorneys with the Office of General Counsel are known to be working on the rulemaking, the former officials said. It’s unclear if any agency experts on climate science are involved in the process.
The accelerated effort to kill the endangerment finding contrasts sharply with the one that led to its creation in 2009.
While the Obama EPA finalized the declaration that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare — which made it possible to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act — technical staff began working on it years earlier under the George W. Bush administration.
“It wasn’t just writing the finding,” said Benjamin DeAngelo, a former EPA official who served as the technical lead for the 2009 finding. “It was the accompanying technical document that brought together all the science. And then there were 11 volumes of responses to comments that we did very thoroughly. It was definitely one of the most intense work experiences of my career.”
DeAngelo, one of many senior EPA career officials who left the agency last year, said that in 2009, EPA drew its conclusions from scientific reports like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment to avoid cherrypicking research from individual studies.
“New studies are coming out all the time, whereas, if you rely on these other scientific assessments, which have already done the job of reviewing and synthesizing the full body of scientific literature at the time, that approach is much more defensible,” he said.
The team also processed and responded to about 11,000 comments collected during the draft finding’s public comment period, he said. That took many months.
“We didn’t have any [artificial intelligence] tools available to us at the time,” DeAngelo noted. “We got contractor support to help us kind of sift through all the comments and put all the comments into spreadsheets and bin them by category. And then we had the legal people working on the legal comments, we had the technical science people working on the technical comments. A lot of comments required both legal and technical people to work together.”
The Trump EPA stopped taking public comment for its repeal of the endangerment finding and vehicle climate rules on Sept. 22, 2025. A final package was then sent to the White House on a fast track, arriving at the budget office for review less than four months later, on Jan. 7.
The rule’s docket shows that of the 572,000 public comments EPA received, only 31,000 have been posted.
Richard Revesz, who served as White House regulatory chief under Biden, said, “EPA has an obligation to respond to all material comments at the time that it promulgates the final rule.”
“At that time, the comments need to be available to the public because challenges to the agency’s action can be based on its failure to adequately respond to comments,” he said.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch pointed to the agency’s policy of only posting one representative sample from mass-comment campaigns coordinated by groups that oppose EPA’s endangerment or vehicle rules repeal. The docket shows there were 184 such campaigns involving multiple submissions of the same comments.
“Additionally, comments that contain threatening or profane language and copyrighted materials will not be publicly posted to Regulations.gov,” she added in an email to POLITICO’s E&E News.
Many of the comments EPA received will likely be general statements of support or opposition that don’t require responses. But thousands will raise detailed issues with the scientific assertions EPA made, or with its legal arguments for scrapping the endangerment finding. The agency will have to grapple with those issues in the final rule, or face possible rebukes in court.
EPA has said it would use AI to speed up regulatory work, though it hasn’t given details about what model it will use or how.
DeAngelo said AI could help organize the tome of written opinions the agency received, but “I think you need some humans to respond to the comments.”
Hirsch said “EPA has not used AI to review public comments related to the proposed reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding.”
