Trump Administration Moves To Repeal Landmark Obama-Era Climate Finding

The Trump administration is taking steps to repeal a key climate policy from the Obama era, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin confirmed Wednesday, according to The Hill.

“EPA has sent to the Office of Management and Budget a proposed rule to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding from the Obama EPA,” Zeldin told Newsmax this week.

That 2009 determination, made under President Obama, found that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane posed a threat to public health. It provided the legal foundation for regulating emissions from vehicles and other sources under the Clean Air Act.

“Through the endangerment finding, there has been into the trillions worth of regulations, including tailpipe emissions and including electric vehicle mandates,” Zeldin said.

While Biden-era vehicle emissions standards didn’t explicitly mandate electric cars, they were expected to significantly shift the market toward them. The repeal of the endangerment finding could undercut such climate rules entirely.

The move, first reported by The New York Times, signals a major escalation in Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations. Although his first term saw the weakening of emissions limits, the endangerment finding itself remained intact—until now.

Critics warn repealing it would gut the EPA’s authority to address climate change. “We are right back to full-throated climate denialism of the early 2000s,” said Zealan Hoover, a former senior EPA advisor under Biden. He called it “insane” to deny climate change’s impacts on public health.

“Climate change impacts public health because it changes the Earth’s climate patterns in ways that are beyond both what the human body and our built systems, evolved to have been designed to adapt [to]… that looks like extreme heat… sea level rise… more damaging storm surges and even flooding on non-storm days,” Hoover added.

The 2009 endangerment finding followed a 2007 Supreme Court ruling requiring the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases threaten public health. That ruling authorized the agency to regulate them if they did.

The Hill writes that although the agency has floated the idea of repealing the finding before, this is the first concrete proposal. In March, the EPA said it would “reconsider” the finding without specifying a direction.

The current proposal is not yet final. Formal revocation could take months or years, and the agency appears to still be developing its case. A similar recent EPA move argued that power plants’ emissions should not be considered “significant” contributors to dangerous air pollution—signaling a broader strategy to eliminate climate-based regulations.

Zeldin, during his confirmation hearing, declined to say whether he believes the EPA has a duty to regulate climate change.