The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed axing or reforming major Biden-era rules on power plants on Wednesday.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced that his agency is moving to repeal the Biden administration’s signature emissions rules for power plants, an Obama-era rule on emissions and the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule, all of which strictly regulated power plants. The announcement is part of a broader deregulatory agenda from the Trump administration that aims to terminate stringent Biden-era rules that burdened the industry and would lead to exorbitant electricity costs and a weaker grid if fully implemented, energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation previously.
“Both Obama and Biden erected every barrier, proposed every regulation — even some unlawful ones — to do whatever they could think of to thwart American energy,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday. “The good news is, those days are over … This action is only a proposal. If finalized, no power plant will be allowed to emit more than they do today or as much as they did a few years ago.”
EPA is proposing to repeal the unconstitutional 2015 Obama “Clean Power Plan”, Biden’s “Clean Power Plan 2.0”, and the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (reverting to the effective 2012 standards).
These rules imposed massive costs on power plants, raised the cost of…
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) June 11, 2025
“Affordable, reliable electricity is key to the American dream and a natural byproduct of national energy dominance,” Zeldin said. “According to many, the primary purpose of these Biden-Harris administration regulations was to destroy industries that didn’t align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry. Together, these rules have been criticized as being designed to regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence.”
Officially titled the “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants” and referred to by critics as the Clean Power Plan 2.0, the Biden administration finalized the power plant rules in April 2024 and aimed to effectively force all coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants to reduce their carbon emissions by 90% via carbon capture and sequestration technology within approximately 15 years in order to continue operating.
Critics have described the EPA’s proposal as an impractical backdoor attempt to achieve outcomes similar to those of the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan,” which the Supreme Court struck down in 2022. In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA overstepped its authority as an administrative agency in attempting to implement the plan.
“The Clean Power Plan 2.0 amounts to a form of federal commandeering,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said in a statement. “States are faced with a loss of a significant portion of their electricity generation capacity, and their manufacturing base, by restructuring their energy systems to align with the EPA’s vision. This is not cooperative federalism; it is coercion.”
Additionally, EPA suggested a repeal of the 2015 emissions rule for new fossil fuel-fired power plants, issued under former President Barack Obama’s administration.
If these restrictive requirements are repealed, the proposed changes would reduce regulatory costs for the power sector by $19 billion over 20 years starting in 2026, equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion annually, according to EPA estimates.
The 2024 MATS rule aimed to enforce mercury and other emissions reductions standards on some coal-fired power plants, and Zeldin noted in Wednesday remarks that his agency intends to reform those rules rather than do away with them altogether. Though the Biden administration asserted that these regulations were critical steps to combat climate change and would not compromise grid reliability, energy sector experts explained to the DCNF that the rules could lead to significant reliability challenges and economic damages if fully enacted as intended.
The initial 2012 MATS rule has been effective in safeguarding public health and the environment, though the Biden-era rule has disturbed the coal industry across at least 12 states, the EPA press release states. If passed, the proposed repeal of the 2024 MATS rule would reduce regulatory costs, saving $120 million a year or $1.2 billion over a decade, the EPA estimates.
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