The Biden administration is urging the nation’s highest bench to keep lawsuits over EPA rules in a federal appellate court in Washington that is viewed as deferential to the agency.
In a brief filed Friday, federal attorneys representing EPA made the case that the agency’s denial of 105 requests from small oil refineries for exemptions from the renewable fuel standard was a decision with national implications and must therefore be reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as required by the Clean Air Act.
EPA said that although five other regional appeals courts agreed to transfer challenges against the denials back to the D.C. Circuit, a refusal by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to do the same has opened the agency to “fragmentation of judicial review.”
“That would create a bifurcated RFS program consisting of one program for remanded petitions for most of the nation, and a separate, more favorable program for exemption claimants in the Fifth Circuit,” EPA wrote. “That result is contrary to Congress’s direction to ensure a uniform, nationwide framework for increasing renewable fuel use.”
