Donald Trump’s return to power comes against a backdrop of the well-known anti-environmental legacy of his first term. His assertion that climate change was a “hoax,” was followed by the rolling back or outright revocation of more than 100 environmental regulations and policies, as tracked by numerous universities and newspapers at the time.
Blue-state attorneys general let none of this go without a fight — filing dozens of lawsuits and taking other actions on all manner of Trump administration moves, not just those connected to the environment, energy and climate. Connecticut was in the thick of it, especially on climate issues related to air quality and the emissions known to contribute to global warming and climate change.
But the second Trump administration could prove even more challenging for the attorneys general. It arrives with previous experience and a team potentially less prone to the mistakes that often caused failures in court in the first go-round. Trump will also have majorities in both chambers of Congress to bolster his agenda.
There are also the very specific policy and action recommendations in Project 2025, the conservative governing plan developed by the Heritage Foundation with assistance from many officials connected to Trump’s first term. After facing serious blowback to the plan during the campaign, Trump claimed he knew nothing about it, though his campaign website contained some of the same ideas.
Trump has since hired several Project 2025 authors for his new administration including a key architect, Russell Vought, to run the Office of Management and Budget. Vought held that same position for part of Trump’s first administration.
There is also a super-majority conservative U.S. Supreme Court that has already flexed its muscles. It has issued a number of rulings that have effectively closed off avenues for challenges. The Chevron decision in June and the court’s use of the so-called major questions doctrine both generally now restrict what agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department can do without specific direction from Congress.
“It’s changed everything,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, who took office halfway through Trump’s first term, picking up the fight from his predecessor George Jepsen, in conjunction with attorneys general around the country.
“It’s hard to overstate how profound this change is,” Tong said. “It essentially overturns the whole apple cart of regulatory infrastructure in this country.”
“I think we’re expecting a fight on everything. And that regulatory process — in changes in rulemaking — is going to grind to a very slow crawl and in some cases, to a halt. And that was the point of the people that initiated this.”
The Supreme Court rulings were destined to cause difficulties for Connecticut and other states regardless of whether Trump or Harris won. Tong said he and his blue-state brethren had been planning for both contingencies, though he wouldn’t say what the strategies will be.
“We’ve been preparing for the prospect of the Trump presidency for a long time now, and we are very closely coordinated and aligned,” he said. “We are ready.”
Roger Reynolds, senior legal director with the advocacy group Save the Sound called the Supreme Court rulings hugely concerning. “We’re in a really critical place right now. They have a clear anti-regulatory agenda,” he said. “It’s about putting their hands on the scales on the side of the regulated industries.”
Connecticut’s Democratic senate leaders, President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, sent a letter last week to Gov. Ned Lamont urging him to prepare to combat Trump administration actions that could hurt the state and the region. The request follows California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to hold a special legislative session to ensure there is enough money to take legal action against the Trump administration when necessary. Meanwhile, the governors of Colorado and Illinois are forming a blue state governors’ coalition to oppose Trump administration efforts.
The Biden administration has methodically reinstated many of Trump’s first administration rollbacks and fortified them with both regulatory-enhanced programs and funding, such as in the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure act.
Trump’s own campaign statements and promises as presented in his platform, Agenda 47, as well as Project 2025, could initiate another round of climate change, energy and environmental whiplash.
According to published reports, two of the first administration’s more effective members, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, both former fossil fuel industry lobbyists, are back at work in the transition and could be in line for positions in the new administration.
Within a week of the election Trump named former Long Island Republican congressman Lee Zeldin to run the EPA. He has limited environmental expertise but is a Trump loyalist. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a fossil fuel proponent, was nominated to head the Interior Department and to lead a new National Energy Council. And a fracking company executive, Chris Wright, was named to lead the Energy Department and sit on that council. Wright has said there is no climate crisis.
A close review of the nearly 900-page Project 2025 shows that it targets climate change, as well as energy and environmental programs and regulations. The project seeks to cripple the EPA, curtail if not eliminate funding and subsidies for clean and renewable energy programs — including for electric vehicles — as well as eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. And it would eliminate any focus on environmental justice.
It seeks to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which is popular enough among Republicans whose states and districts have benefitted that 18 members of the House Republican Caucus sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson asking that it not be repealed.
Project 2025 also derides the idea of addressing climate change as a policy goal and seeks to remove even the mention of it broadly throughout government.
It contains pointed political statements such as this: “Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”
And it makes a number of specific recommendations to remove climate change as a consideration, such as with the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: “End the focus on climate change and green subsidies;” and for the Energy Department: “Eliminate political and climate-change interference in DOE approvals of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.”
Project 2025 would privatize the National Weather Service and dramatically reduce the percentage of funding provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for recovery from disasters like the historic flooding Connecticut, and other states, have experienced due to climate change.
During the campaign Trump disavowed knowledge of the plan, although Agenda 47 says some of the same things in far less detail. It reads: “On Day One, President Trump will rescind every one of Joe Biden’s industry-killing, jobs-killing, pro-China and anti-American electricity regulations,” and “President Trump will DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
The impacts of any of these would likely be felt down to state and local levels.
Connecticut’s biggest worries
If the Trump administration implements the environmental recommendations of Project 2025, Connecticut as well as other states face the possibility that unspent federal funds for climate and energy projects could be clawed back, costing jobs and the economic development around them.
Among 11 bullet points a conservative administration should pursue in energy policy: “Support repeal of massive spending bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which established new programs and are providing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to renewable energy developers, their investors, and special interests, and support the rescinding of all funds not already spent by these programs.”
There is also the potential that the funding Connecticut and nearly all states have grown to rely on for large energy and electric grid projects could disappear. Project 2025 calls for eliminating and defunding the Grid Deployment Office.
And there could be the kinds of regulatory shifts seen during the first administration when approvals for offshore wind were slow-walked. Trump, who for years has stated his hatred for offshore wind, has threatened to stop all offshore wind projects on day one, referring to subsidies for them as “insane.”
Connecticut and the entire New England grid has been counting on offshore wind development to bolster its energy capabilities in the face of expanding power needs for economic development around data centers and other large businesses, as well as for electrification needs for motor vehicle charging and heat pump conversions.
Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes steered clear of any hand-wringing when asked what she expects from a second Trump administration. She did, however, note that roughly a quarter of DEEP’s budget for both programs and personnel comes from a variety of different federal grants across a number of different federal agencies, EPA being the big one.
“There are a lot of different scenarios that people are contemplating with the new Congress and with the new administration, but it’s early to say what may happen,” she said. “We’re assessing options under different scenarios, but it’s too early to tell what the impacts will be.”
She ticked off a laundry list of programs that recently received federal money and noted the need to get the funds distributed and implemented. “We’re staying in touch with our neighboring states and with project developers to help understand how we can be nimble in the face of any changes that may come.”
And she said DEEP will be collaborating with the state Attorney General’s office and will follow its lead on any steps that need to be taken to protect Connecticut’s mission and interests.
One likely impact for Connecticut is that Trump’s policies will further prolong the now 50-year battle for clean air.
The state continues to face pollution and ozone levels that have long kept it from meeting federal air quality standards. The entire state does not meet 2015 standards and the southern part doesn’t even meet more lenient ones from 2008. That’s even as still tighter standards were issued in February.
The heat of this summer has once again resulted in a large number of bad air days — 23. The result over time has been persistently high asthma rates in the state, especially among vulnerable populations.
A principal cause is pollution and greenhouse gases that blow in from Midwest power plants running on fossil fuels of oil, gas and coal. Connecticut has long contended the situation violates the Good Neighbor provision of the Clean Air Act designed to keep upwind states from polluting downwind ones.
After four years fighting the first Trump administration’s efforts to loosen regulations on both greenhouse gas and standard pollutant emissions, Tong’s office has remained active the last four years, battling red-state attorneys general attempting to thwart the Biden administration’s tighter Good Neighbor regulations. In June, the Supreme Court stayed those regulations and sent them back to the lower courts.
“It’s not great,” Tong said, when asked whether the case is now stuck. “That doesn’t mean I’m gonna fight any less hard than I have. It doesn’t mean that we are any less focused on it. No one’s giving up, and no one’s saying darn it, because we have Lee Zeldin and a six-three conservative court that we should just move on to other things. It’s clean air; it’s foundational and fundamental to public health, so we’re just gonna keep at it. It’s not optional.”
Reynolds at Save the Sound is equally gloomy, saying the current litigation scenario puts everything several years out — again. “It doesn’t mean that it’s not necessarily going to go forward, but it certainly means it’s not going to be implemented anytime in the near future,” he said. “It’s absolutely a fair assessment that we’re not going to see clean air in Connecticut anytime soon.”
And the axis on environmental and climate regulation is likely to flip again as the Trump administration is expected to replace the Biden rules with their own less restrictive ones. The rulemaking process takes time and is likely to set off a whole new wave of court challenges, delaying things even more.
This session, the Supreme Court is taking up a challenge to the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that requires in-depth environmental reviews for federal projects. A recent federal appeals court ruling curtailed how those reviews can be structured.
There are also hints in Project 2025 that the second Trump administration might try to overturn the so-called Endangerment Finding, which allowed greenhouse gases to be regulated — specifically as part of motor vehicle, power plant and industrial emissions.
All of these could further limit the tools attorneys general and others have for challenging environmental laws and regulations the new administration may want to overturn from the Biden era and before, or may seek to put in place.
Reynolds points out that states still have a lot of power — to approve power plants and review pipelines, among other things. And he notes that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts specifically allow citizen suits if the federal government isn’t complying with those laws. He said that’s been Save the Sound’s bread and butter in upholding environmental regulations.
“That’s why, since the ‘70s, through all the administrations we’ve had, many of which have put a bull’s eye on environmental regulations, we’ve continued to have progress,” he said. “Our strategy is going to continue to be to enforce these incredibly powerful acts, and fight rollbacks and do what we can to get funding for these initiatives, and to get states and municipalities to take the lead.”
Reynolds isn’t the only one talking about states and municipalities taking the lead.
Brad Campbell, president of the Conservation Law Foundation and a former EPA regional administrator, said simply opposing Trump as state and local officials did during the first administration will not be enough this time, based on what Project 2025 espouses and what Trump has already said, because both clearly cater to the fossil fuel industry.
“What we’ll be pushing for is for states to fill in any gaps that are created by Trump’s attacks on federal agencies and the rollback of some standards,” he said. “A major concern in New England is the climate investments that Biden was able to secure in Congress. Those are enormously important to accelerating New England’s energy transition.”
But if the Trump administration embraces Project 2025’s threat to cut funding to clean energy and other climate-targeted programs, tax incentives and entire programs and offices — across all government, not just environment and energy areas — will states have the money to take the lead?
“States may have to come up with additional funding for the energy transition if the federal government goes into full retreat,” Campbell said.
Focus on the states
“Not going to happen this year,” said Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex and co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee. “The state budgets before Trump won are already out of balance.”
He noted that many state employees — including at DEEP — are paid in whole or part with federal funds. “If you lose 10% of state employees because their funding is cut directly by federal budget changes,” he said. “I don’t know how we make that up, right? I just think it’s going to be a stressful, difficult time.”
Needleman said he still plans to hold a series of meetings before the legislative session begins to formulate policies and initiatives.
“I do not believe that anyone can fight a battle with only a strong defense. I think we need a combination of a sensible offense and a thoughtful defense about the damage that they can do, because we are going to have a target on our back,” he said.
His co-chair, Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, said he and Needleman are already trying to figure out whether to resurrect some of the major energy, environmental and climate legislation that failed in the last two sessions. The presumption at that time was that the federal government would be at least neutral, if not supportive broadly of climate change initiatives.
“This may further chill our willingness to take on big things,” he said. “I would never throw up my hands and walk away. But coming into the session I was already feeling frustrated, constrained, finding it difficult to do the things that I think we really need to do, which are of bigger consequence, like a lot of this necessary investment in infrastructure.
“Now you layer in on top of it, either federal preemption of any regulatory framework we might choose, or certainly a cessation or diminishment of funding for the things that we’ve counted on the feds for in the past. It’s very hard to figure, what do we do first?”
Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich and ranking member on the committee, said his goal is to make the best policy he can in alignment with his goals of low cost, reliable and environmentally responsible energy.
“Whether there’s a Democratic presidential administration or a Republican one, and there is going to be both in the next 20 years, and policy at the federal level — you make the best of it,” he said. “I haven’t seen, really in any substantial way, that federal policy has helped us meet those goals in Connecticut over the last decade or so.
“The goal is to make policy on a state level. You can’t count on federal policies. We need things to be sustainable on their own. Subsidies will not solve our woes.”
Steinberg offers some ideas for getting money if federal funding decreases or disappears. He suggests collaborations with the business community or investors. He said it might be worth considering something like taxing data center developers to cover the energy burden they bring. Such a tax could be reduced or eliminated if the company installs solar, geothermal, or some other energy reduction mechanism. “Anything to mitigate their energy burden by like a third or 50% before they can escape this tax,” he said.
The point, Steinberg said, is to figure out ways to get things done. It could be opting for low cost solutions in the near term or working with the Green Bank on private funding sources.
“I think that there are things that we must explore doing, even if it’s going to be harder,” he said.
Others said the transition to clean energy in New England is well underway which will help survive another round of Donald Trump.
“There is so much momentum behind clean energy technologies in particular,” said Julie McNamara, deputy policy director climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s two things at once. There will continue to be progress and there will not be as much progress as there could or must have been.
“Certain things will slow or stop because we’re approaching the parts of the clean energy transition where it gets hard. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and so we’re starting to need to take those next further steps, the kind of things where It takes real, intentional work to couple policy with economics and a vision for the future.”
But Steinberg warned against the impulse to just wait Trump out. “It is not only not an answer; it would be irresponsible, in my view.”
He said everyone will need to be creative. “But the one thing we cannot lose is our resolve,” he said. “We just need to keep doing it, because we don’t have a choice.”