WASHINGTON—After nearly 20 years, the climate policy responsible for a generation of greenhouse gas regulations has been repealed, President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Thursday.
The regulation, known as the Endangerment Finding, expanded the definition of harmful air pollutants to include greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, allowing the EPA to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. Zeldin said Thursday that the rule allowed EPA regulatory power beyond its congressional authority and announced that the Endangerment Finding is officially eliminated,
President Donald Trump described the action as the “largest deregulatory action in American history” on Thursday, joined by Zeldin at the White House. Zeldin noted that the endangerment finding has been referred to as the “holy grail of regulatory overreach” and that the Clean Air Act does not permit the regulations that former administrations have used it to enact. Trump added that the repeal is estimated to lower the average cost of a new vehicle by around $3,000.
“In this final rule, EPA is saving American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion, eliminating both the Obama-era 2009 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Endangerment Finding and all subsequent federal GHG emission standards for all vehicles and engines of model years 2012 to 2027 and beyond. The action also eliminates all off-cycle credits, including for the almost universally hated start-stop feature,” the EPA announced Thursday.
Several energy policy experts and agency insiders told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the 2009 Endangerment Finding was enacted by the Obama administration for political reasons, relied on “cherry-picked data” and its rescission ends years of regulatory overreach. Trump administration officials also touted consumer savings the repeal is expected to usher in.
“It’s over. Done. Finished. … The elimination of the Endangerment Finding is signed, sealed and delivered,” Zeldin said on Thursday. “If congress didn’t authorize it, the EPA shouldn’t be doing it. … American people are tired of paying the price of political games.”
The Trump EPA proposed rescinding the endangerment finding in July 2025 and accepted public comments before announcing the final verdict. Trump directed the EPA to reconsider the finding on his first day back in the Oval Office.
An EPA spokesperson previously told the DCNF that “the Obama-era Endangerment Finding was never about sound science, following the law, or protecting human health, it was about fulfilling a radical political agenda. Their rule wasn’t built on gold standard science; it was built on climate alarmism and creative legal fiction with the goal of expanding EPA’s power beyond what Congress intended.”
The EPA noted that since 2009, many of the related “doomsday predictions” have not come to pass and that “the same flawed models and fear-based assumptions that fueled climate hysteria have failed every real-world test.”
Under the Biden administration, the EPA used the Endangerment Finding to impose a de-facto electric vehicle (EV) mandate. The agency estimates that the Endangerment Finding has been used to justify over $1 trillion in regulations, including the EV mandate. The Biden administration also enacted harsh regulations for power plants, though the Trump administration has moved to roll them back ahead of their implementation date. Energy policy experts previously told the DCNF that the Biden-era rules for power plants would hamper the American energy sector, spike costs and harm the grid if fully implemented.
After Congress passed multiple resolutions repealing California’s authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles in the state and numerous others by 2035, Trump officially dismantled the EV mandate on June 12.
Zeldin said Thursday that it was families and small business that paid the price for the onslaught of climate regulations, arguing that the finding did not only lead to regulating emissions, but also targeting consumer freedom and the American dream.
CEO of the American Energy Institute, Jason Isaac, told the DCNF that “the administration is right to start with mobile sources because that is where the Endangerment Finding began and where Americans feel the damage most directly. Vehicle greenhouse gas rules built on the finding have driven up car prices, limited consumer choice, and imposed a de facto EV mandate on working families. Repealing it for motor vehicles delivers immediate affordability relief, restores the Clean Air Act to its proper scope, and lays the legal groundwork to unwind similar overreach across the energy sector.”
Notably, some internal communications show that top Obama administration officials seemed to treat the finding as a foregone conclusion before the draft rule was announced. Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson wrote in a memo to the president before the Endangerment Finding announcement that “climate change is the most pressing environmental issue of our time, and the ‘endangerment finding’ soon to be issued by EPA will be the United States Government’s first official recognition of this threat,” documents show.
Mandy Gunasekara, a former EPA chief of staff under the first Trump administration, also told the DCNF that the Endangerment Finding was “more political than scientific.”
“The suggestion that this was some comprehensive scientific analysis is laughable,” Gunasekara told the DCNF, noting that during the first Trump administration, though the EPA seriously considered rescinding the rule, they “just weren’t ready for it.”
“The time is right and the time is now for the administrator to finally repeal the endangerment finding,” Gunasekara added.
Senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and Trump EPA transition member, Steve Milloy, told the DCNF that the announcement makes for a “great day,” but a “hard fight ahead” remains.
“While the rollback of the endangerment finding for vehicles is a great moment for American workers and consumers, it must still survive judicial scrutiny and be the vehicle by which the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA is reversed,” Milloy told the DCNF. “Without the latter, the next Democrat administration could easily reinstate the endangerment finding and the Trump administration effort would have been for nothing. This is a great day, but there’s a hard fight ahead.”
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