The Trump administration is taking its first clear step toward a top deregulatory objective: dismantling an embattled EPA smog control strategy.
EPA sent a proposal to the White House regulations office Monday that would revisit its 2023 decision to disapprove states’ “good neighbor” plans on the grounds that they didn’t go far enough to limit the spread of smog-forming pollution across state lines.
Those disapprovals cleared the way for EPA under former President Joe Biden to issue the federal strategy that to varying degrees imposed new emission limits on coal-fired power plants and other industrial facilities in 23 states.
Following a daisy chain of legal challenges, the Supreme Court stayed that federal plan in June 2024, saying EPA had failed to reasonably explain how it would work after lower courts had blocked the earlier disapprovals — and, by extension, the federal strategy — from taking effect for many of those states.
