On July 29, 2025, EPA announced a proposal to rescind the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. The Endangerment Finding is a prerequisite for regulating emissions from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines. Absent this finding, EPA lacks statutory authority under Section 202 of the Clean Air Act to prescribe standards for GHG emissions. Therefore, EPA also proposed to remove GHG regulations for light-, medium-, and heavy-duty on-highway vehicles.
On February 12, 2026, President Trump in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. In this final rule, EPA is 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.
However, the final rule’s Federal Register notice — with an official Federal Register volume, page number, and date of publication — has not yet been published or made available online as of this morning. Therefore, there currently isn’t a Federal Register citation you can link to for the final rule itself. Docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194 on Regulations.gov – look for the entry titled something like “Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards; Final Rule” once it is published.
Media reaction to EPA’s reversal of the 2009 greenhouse-gas “endangerment finding” has split into three predictable camps—and the common denominator is litigation risk and regulatory whiplash.
Environmental, public-health, and legal advocacy groups framed the action as unlawful and scientifically indefensible, emphasizing increased pollution burdens and foreseeable health harms; several publicly committed to prompt Administrative Procedure Act and Clean Air Act challenges.
State officials (including Democratic attorneys general) condemned the rule as contrary to settled law and announced or signaled imminent court challenges, teeing up multistate suits that will likely seek stays pending review.
Industry-facing coverage is notably more mixed: while deregulatory voices and some editorial commentary praised the move as correcting “overreach,” business and utility stakeholders (and legal analysts) highlighted the possibility that weakening the federal Clean Air Act framework could reopen “public nuisance” and other climate tort theories, increasing exposure and uncertainty even for companies that otherwise favor deregulation.
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