The Trump Administration and environmental policy: Reagan redux?

Presidents possess an array of powers to shape environmental policy. In addition to their abilities to drive legislative agendas and block legislation using their veto power, presidents have primary control over the implementation of laws through their authority over the bureaucracy. Presidents can issue executive orders to change the organization or functioning of the bureaucracy, influence the substance and implementation of policies through rulemaking, shift enforcement priorities, and use litigation strategically to alter environmental policy outcomes (Klyza and Sousa 2013). In addition, presidents are delegated unilateral authority under specific statutes, like the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to designate national monuments. Each of these powers has the advantage of not requiring congressional approval, giving the president significant power to shape environmental policy without the consent of congress.

Executive action became a prominent means of environmental policymaking under Theodore Roosevelt (Klyza and Sousa 2013, 91). Roosevelt shepherded the growth of and directed a federal bureaucracy governing the nation’s vast public ___domain and exercised unilateral authority in designating protected lands as national forests and national monuments. The ___domain of executive authority increased with the New Deal’s dramatic expansion of the administrative state, but Nixon was the first president to use this executive authority across a broader scope of environmental problems. Where Nixon largely used an expanded executive authority to increase federal responsibilities to govern the environment, Reagan wielded executive power even more extensively to circumscribe federal action on the environment. Since the mid-1970s, we have seen a pattern of executive partisan polarization on the environment, in which Republican presidents pursue environmental deregulation and increased exploitation of natural resources and Democratic presidents push for expanded federal authority and increased environmental protection.

The Reagan Administration’s approach to environmental policy was shaped by a conservative ideological agenda of regulatory reform, greater reliance on the private sector and the free market, and devolution of authority to states and local government. To achieve these goals, the Administration selected ideological loyalists for senior posts in administrative agencies, used staff and budget cuts to constrain agencies, centralized control over agency decision-making in the White House, instituted new procedures for reviewing regulations through the Office of Management and Budget, appointed conservative judges to the federal judiciary, and publicized an anti-environmental narrative (Kraft and Vig 1984; Layzer 2009; Layzer 2012). Similar strategies are found in every subsequent Republican presidency. Although George H. W. Bush came into office on a pro-environmental protection platform, he reoriented his focus in the second half of his term due to concerns about reelection and pressure from industry and conservative Republicans (Layzer 2012; Daynes and Sussman 2010). George W. Bush followed more closely in Reagan’s footsteps in his pursuit of anti-environmental policy measures. Though he campaigned on a moderate environmental platform, Bush immediately sought to overturn many of Clinton’s environmental achievements. He used his executive authority to reshape air pollution control in a more lenient direction, opened public lands to extractive industry, reduced enforcement of environmental regulations, undercut endangered species protection, and failed to take action to address climate change (Layzer 2012).

The actions of the Trump Administration follow this pattern of partisan environmental governance. In its first hundred days, the Trump Administration acted aggressively to undo the environmental achievements of the Obama Administration, and the roll back continues unabated.^{Footnote 1} On climate change, Trump issued an executive order initiating the repeal of the Clean Power Plan (President Obama’s signature climate change policy), initiated the process of pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, disbanded the National Climate Assessment, withdrew guidance for agencies requiring inclusion of climate change impacts in National Environmental Policy Act environmental assessments, and rescinded the Obama Administration’s metric for the social cost of carbon. The Trump Administration has also moved to open public lands to oil and gas development, delayed the implementation of pollution standards for methane and smog, approved two controversial pipeline projects (Keystone XL and Dakota Access), rejected a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, eliminated a requirement that infrastructure projects receiving federal funds consider the risks of flooding, and ordered the expansion of offshore drilling. The Administration is currently reviewing, and will likely overturn or weaken, a rule that expands the reach of the Clean Water Act (the Waters of the United States rule), Obama-era fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, restrictions on hydraulic fracturing on public lands, limits on methane emissions at new oil and gas drilling sites, an existing habitat management plan for the sage grouse, and protections for at least 10 national monuments. The breadth of these actions illustrates the scope of the Trump Administration’s anti-environmental agenda and its commitments to reduce regulation and unburden industry.

Political commentators have already drawn comparisons between the Reagan and Trump Administrations’ approaches to environment given their shared explicit attacks on environmental policy (Carswell 2017; Tong 2017). In order to probe this historical resonance, I compare Trump’s and Reagan’s uses of four strategies to weaken environmental protection: politicized appointments to federal environmental agencies, agency staff and budgets cuts, weakening enforcement of environmental laws, and appointment of conservative judges to the federal judiciary.^{Footnote 2}

Political appointments

Most of the staff at federal agencies are career bureaucrats, but presidents have the discretion to replace staff in senior positions with hand-picked successors. These political appointments are used by presidents to shape the priorities of administrative agencies in line with their agendas. In addition to selecting bureaucrats that align ideologically with their administrations, Republican presidents since Reagan have routinely appointed representatives of regulated industries or activists sympathetic to industry to the agencies that regulate them. Public controversy over environmental agency appointments began with Reagan’s nominations of James Watt as Secretary of the Interior and Anne Gorsuch as EPA Administrator. Objections to Watt’s nomination centered on his support for the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement demanding return of federal lands to states, and his work for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which advocates for extractive industry and developers. Prior to heading the EPA, Gorsuch was an attorney and member of the Colorado legislature with little experience in environmental management, but an ideological commitment to cutting environmental regulations (Kraft 2000, 29). Additional concerns were raised about EPA political appointments, including the nominations of a former counsel for General Motors (Frank A. Shepherd) for Associate Administrator for Legal Counsel and Enforcement (the EPA was reviewing the Clean Air Act Amendments at the time), a lawyer for Exxon (Robert M. Perry) for EPA’s General Counsel, and a lawyer who represented Dow Chemical (Nolan E. Clark) for Associate Administrator for Policy and Resource Management (Shabecoff 1981b).

Trump’s EPA transition team, led by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian non-profit policy institute partially financed by the coal industry, laid the groundwork for EPA’s environmental retrenchment being carried out by Trump’s EPA chief, Scott Pruitt (Fountain 2016). Opposition to Trump’s nomination of Pruitt erupted immediately. As Attorney General of Oklahoma, Pruitt repeatedly sued the federal government to block environmental regulations and led the national effort to impede the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan (Davenport and Lipton 2016). Pruitt’s nomination provoked resistance not only from environmental advocacy groups, but also an unprecedented concerted effort by EPA employees to block his nomination by lobbying their congressional representatives (Davenport 2017a). Additional EPA nominees include Andrew Wheeler, a coal and mining industry lobbyist, for Deputy Administrator; Erik Baptist, Senior Counsel at the American Petroleum Institute, for Senior Deputy General Counsel; Michael Dourson, a chemical industry consultant, to head the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention; Nancy Beck, an executive at the American Chemistry Council, for Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention; and William Wehrum, a lawyer who represented oil, gas, coal, and chemical companies and challenged Clean Air Act provisions, for Assistant Administrator of Air and Radiation (Henry 2017; Leven 2017; Kaplan and Lipton 2017; Lipton 2017; Grandoni 2017).^{Footnote 3} Rick Perry, a former presidential candidate and governor of Texas, who in a 2011 presidential debate called for the elimination of the Department of Energy (though he could not remember the name of the department), now heads it (Davenport 2016). Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, was initially seen as a moderate choice despite his 3% League of Conservation Voters score for his one term in congress, but, since confirmed, has adhered to Trump’s anti-regulatory and pro-extraction agenda (Davenport and Fandos 2017).

Agency budgets

Though presidential budgets are not binding (the Constitution grants congress the power of the purse), they do serve to advertise the president’s agenda and priorities to both congress and the public. Taken in this context, President Trump’s proposed 2018 budget reveals the extent to which he believes environmental institutions and policies are unnecessary. The budget includes dramatic budget and staff cuts to the EPA. It proposed cutting EPA’s budget by 31.4%, the greatest of any agency, and eliminating 3200 full-time positions out of the EPA’s 15,000. Internal EPA documents revealed even deeper proposed cuts; while grants to states for waste treatment and drinking water safety would be maintained, the rest of EPA’s budget would be cut by 43% (Eilperin et al., 2017). Even without congressional authorization, Pruitt has already begun trimming staff at EPA using buyouts and early retirements to drive attrition (about 20% of EPA staff were eligible for retirement in 2017) (Dennis 2017a). Nearly 400 employees had left by August 31, 2017, and more than 700 by December 10, 2017 (Puko 2017; Lipton and Ivory 2017). Proposed EPA budget reductions include cuts to the Office of Enforcement and Compliance that would reduce its funding to the lowest level since 1995, a 50% cut to the Office of Research and Development, halving grants to states and localities, and the elimination of the Environmental Justice program (Dennis and Eilperin 2017). The budget also proposed eliminating more than fifty programs, including the Chesapeake Bay and Great Lakes Programs, cutting the Superfund budget by a third, and eliminating funding for international climate change programs (Dennis and Eilperin 2017). These cuts should not come as a surprise given that on the campaign trail Trump promised to get rid of the EPA “in almost every form” (Dennis and Eilperin 2017). According to reporting by The New York Times, much of the change at EPA is happening behind closed doors, raising concerns about transparency (Davenport and Lipton 2017b). In defending the proposed cuts to congress, Pruitt stated that EPA’s mission could be fulfilled with a smaller budget by prioritizing and reducing “redundancies and inefficiencies” (Dennis 2017b). A recently retired EPA lawyer commented that the proposed cuts raise “serious concerns about the agency’s capacity and integrity” (Dennis 2017b). In response to Pruitt’s intention to devolve environmental regulatory authority to states, Obama’s EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy, asserted, “What he fails to understand is that states do not have the technical capability to do some of this work” (Davenport 2017b). Nearly half of EPA’s budget goes to state-level environmental agencies, and about a third of all state funding for environmental management is supplied by the EPA (Davenport 2017b).

While the EPA fares worst, Trump’s first budget proposed cuts to environmental programs across the board. The budget proposed a 12% cut to the Department of the Interior (DOI), including reductions for the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Geological Survey, and a 6% cut to the Department of Energy (DOE). Proposed funding shifts within the DOE would result in more funding for nuclear security and an effective cut of 18% for the rest of the department’s activities (Mufson 2017a). Specified program cuts to the DOE include eliminating the popular Energy Star program, programs that support research on alternative energy sources and next-generation vehicles, and federal assistance to states to improve energy efficiency for low-income families (Mufson 2017a). The DOE Office of Science, which supports research at universities and national laboratories, would lose $900 million, almost a fifth of its budget (Mufson 2017a). Specified cuts to the DOI, which controls 530 million acres of federal lands, include an 84% reduction to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which allows the federal government to acquire new lands for recreation (Fears 2017). Instead, the budget contains proposals to invest more heavily in fossil fuel exploration and extraction on public lands, including in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Trump’s proposed budget and staff cuts to environment and natural resource agencies echo those proposed by the Reagan Administration. In its first budget, the Reagan Administration sought a $2.1 billion reduction in overall funding for environment and natural resources programs (Shabecoff 1981a). The deepest cuts would come at the EPA. Gorsuch proposed reducing EPA’s budget by 18% for 1983, on top of a planned cut of 16% for 1982 (Shabecoff 1981d). Reductions proposed by Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget would have gone much deeper, slashing the EPA’s operating budget nearly in half over the fiscal years 1982 and 1983, from $1.35 billion in 1981 to $700 million, drawing criticism from even Gorsuch (Shabecoff 1981d). The Administration also proposed cutting 3200, or 30.8%, of EPA’s 10,381 staff (Shabecoff 1981c). These cuts would occur as the EPA’s workload was doubling due to newly assigned responsibilities. President Carter’s EPA chief, Douglas Costle, commented that these proposed cuts would “cripple the agency” (Shabecoff 1981c). Reagan also planned substantial cuts to federal research in his first two years, which would have resulted in an 11% drop in funding for basic research from 1980 to 1982. The proposed cuts so rattled the scientific community that the Administration held an “unprecedented” meeting with nearly 100 leading scientists to calm their fears (Reinhold 1981).

Reagan succeeded in significantly reducing EPA staff in his first two years; by 1982, staff at EPA headquarters had been reduced from 4700 to 3500, and 2618 positions had been eliminated overall (Shabecoff 1982a; Kraft and Vig 1984, 427). The Administration also won substantial reductions in spending on natural resources and environmental programs, including a 46% reduction in spending on pollution control between 1980 and 1986 and a halving of EPA’s research and development funds between 1981 and 1984 (Layzer 2009, 232; Kraft and Vig 1984, 430). By 1983, the EPA had an operational budget 23% lower than in 1981, a fact boasted about by Gorsuch (Shabecoff 1982b).

Enforcement

Federal and state environmental agencies, as well as the Department of Justice, are responsible for the enforcement of environmental laws. The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance coordinates national enforcement policy for a range of federal pollution control laws and oversees compliance by state environmental agencies. Agencies have relatively wide discretion in how they implement and enforce environmental regulations, though congress and the courts may exercise oversight of agency implementation and enforcement when it is lacking or contravenes the law.

A preliminary analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project found that enforcement actions taken by Trump’s EPA in the first six months are significantly lower than that of the three previous administrations: “The administration has lodged 26 cases for violations of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental laws (not including Superfund sites) and it collected $12 million in penalties from companies, the group said. Clinton, Bush, and Obama respectively lodged 45, 31, and 34 cases and collected $25 million, $30 million, and $36 million in penalties” (Mufson 2017b). This analysis is supported by a December 2017 investigative report by the New York Times that found a significant drop in enforcement actions, civil penalties, and injunctive relief actions compared to the previous two administrations (Lipton and Ivory 2017).^{Footnote 4} Trump’s EPA initiated about 1900 civil environmental enforcement cases, a third fewer than the Obama Administration and a quarter fewer than the Bush Administration in their first nine months in office. The Times also found that civil penalties had fallen. In its first nine months, Trump’s EPA sought $50.4 million in fines for cases initiated by the Administration, which, adjusted for inflation, is about 39% of the amount sought by Obama’s EPA and 70% of the sum sought by Bush’s EPA during their first nine months. In civil judicial enforcement cases related to pollution, EPA can require, as a part of the legal settlement of the case, physical improvements (e.g., installation of abatement technology) or operational changes at emitting facilities to remedy compliance failures. In reviewing these cases of injunctive relief, the Times found that Trump’s EPA had required about $1.2 billion in facilities changes, a sharp decrease from those required by the Obama and Bush Administrations (12% of what Obama sought and 48% of what Bush sought). This record accords with the Trump Administration’s proposed 2018 budget reductions of 60% for civil and criminal enforcement and elimination of 200 enforcement jobs at the EPA (Tabuchi 2017). Even if these budget cuts are not legislated, the budget proposal along with the Administration’s enforcement record thus far signals that enforcement will not be a priority even with adequate staff and resources.

The Times report found that the drop in enforcement was being directed from the top of EPA. Conversations with EPA officials and review of internal EPA documents revealed that Pruitt is “less fixated on seeking large penalties” and the drop in enforcement coincides with “major policy changes ordered by Mr. Pruitt after pleas from oil and gas industry executives” (Lipton and Ivory 2017). The Times also found that regional EPA enforcement officers must receive permission from the Washington office to order emitting facilities to perform air and water pollution tests necessary for building a case against polluters, and that such requests have “fallen significantly” at two of the most aggressive regional EPA offices (Chicago and Denver) (Lipton and Ivory 2017). EPA staff attrition, driven by buyouts, and high-level political vacancies at the EPA and the Department of Justice may have also contributed to reductions in enforcement (Lipton and Ivory 2017). Trump’s EPA has defended its enforcement record, stating that “we focus more on bringing people back into compliance than bean counting” (Lipton and Ivory 2017). Pruitt has shifted greater responsibility for environmental enforcement to states. As the Times notes, this devolution is problematic given that the Trump Administration proposed cutting federal funding for state environmental enforcement, state fines are generally much lower than EPA-imposed fines for the same violations, and many states are hesitant to pursue enforcement measures (Lipton and Ivory 2017).

The Reagan Administration also acted to undermine environmental regulations by curtailing enforcement. A similar drop in enforcement occurred at the beginning of the Reagan Administration: “between 1980 and 1982, the number of cases referred to the Justice Department declined by 50 percent, from 200 a year to 100, while the number of enforcement orders dropped by one-third” (Layzer 2012, 109). Both Gorsuch and Watt used institutional reorganizations, in addition to budget and staff cuts, to hamper EPA and Department of Interior enforcement efforts (Kraft and Vig 1984, 429). In the first two years of the Reagan Administration, EPA’s enforcement budget was cut by about 45% (Shabecoff 1983).

Judicial appointments

Judicial appointments provide a means for presidents to institutionalize their ideologies and influence policymaking long after they leave office (federal judgeships are lifetime appointments). They are particularly important to environmental policy because, since the 1970s, environmental policy has increasingly been made in the courts (Wenner 1982; Klyza and Sousa 2013). In addition to the Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals are significant policymaking players given that they hear about 60,000 cases a year and set legal precedent across policy sectors, including environment. Though judges are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, the federal courts have increasingly been perceived as politicized. Since the 1980s, the federal court confirmation process has reflected a partisan political struggle in which presidents seek to appoint judges with their ideological lean. Though, research has shown that judges do not always rule in the ideological direction favored by their appointers (Wenner and Ostberg 1994).

Reagan sought to advance his conservative agenda through the appointment of federal judges sympathetic to his aims. In total, Reagan appointed three justices to the Supreme Court and 47% of all judges sitting on the federal district courts and circuit courts of appeals, in “an attempt to attain ideological uniformity” that was unprecedented at the time (Kovacic 1991, 676). By the time that George H. W. Bush left office, “80 percent of all federal judges were Republican appointees, as were 75 percent of the members of the appellate bench, and Republicans dominated 11 of the 13 courts of appeals” (Layzer 2009, 251). Trump has more judicial openings to fill than previous presidents at the start of his term—140 open slots out of 890 federal judgeships, compared to Obama’s 54 judicial openings—and he faces much less obstruction in the confirmation process given that the Democratic-led Senate changed the rules in 2013 to allow confirmations with only a simple majority (Shogren 2017). Trump has nominated judges to the federal judiciary at a breakneck pace in what the Washington Post called “a year-long drive to permanently alter the judiciary by nominating and confirming conservative jurists to lifetime appointments on the federal bench” (Rucker et al., 2017). Like Reagan, Trump is seeking to leave a lasting ideological mark on governance through his court nominees; the Post reported that Trump’s criteria for judicial picks are that they are young, conservative, and strict constitutionalists (Rucker et al., 2017). In this effort, “arguably the most ideological project of Trump’s presidency,” he has largely delegated the process of selecting potential nominees to his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, with aid from conservative organizations, including the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute (Rucker et al., 2017; Savage 2017). His effort has been successful thus far, having filled one Supreme Court seat with Neil Gorsuch (notably, Anne Gorsuch’s son), an ideological doppelgänger for the late Antonin Scalia, and vacancies on the federal courts of appeals with “a particularly conservative group of judges,” and at a faster clip than any president since Nixon (Savage 2017). While it is too early to judge the impacts of these appointments on federal environmental policy, environmental activists have raised concerns about several of the nominees to the federal courts of appeals and have drawn attention to the environmental legal issues likely to arise during Trump’s tenure, including the president’s authority to shrink the boundaries of existing national monuments, the legality of the extension of the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction under the Waters of the United States rule, and the authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (Shogren 2017).

This analysis reveals that comparisons between the Trump and Reagan Administrations’ approaches to environmental governance are warranted. Trump, following in the footsteps of Reagan, is using the breadth of his executive authority to undermine environmental protection. Reagan was effective in weakening the environmental administrative state, particularly in his first term. Assessments of the EPA in 1983 cite “irremediable damage to the agency,” which was left “demoralized and virtually inert” (Shabecoff 1983). Though Reagan continued to undercut environmental regulation and stymie environmental progress in his second term, he moderated his rhetoric and actions on the environment in response to public backlash and congressional scrutiny (Layzer 2012). At this early stage in the Trump Administration, we have already seen significant rollback of President Obama’s environmental accomplishments, particularly on climate change. How far will President Trump go in the next three years? Will he be constrained in his efforts to roll back environmental policy, as Reagan was? Before addressing obstacles to environmental rollback, I shift from examination of executive-level policies to an analysis of the Republican Party environmental ideology in order to situate Trump’s and Reagan’s actions in a broader political context.

The Reagan and Trump Administrations are part of a larger conservative movement to undermine environmental policy that began in the 1970s and has evolved over time (Layzer 2012). Republican Party platforms offer a way to track the Republican Party’s ideological development on the environment. Party platforms announce a party’s core principles, its policy agenda, and its vision for the nation. Platforms are strategic documents in that they are intended to woo undecided voters by appealing to important issues and criticizing the opposition party’s actions and ideals, but platforms have also been shown to predict what a party will do when in office (Pomper 1967; Pomper and Lederman 1980; Budge and Hofferbert 1990). Each party platform read in isolation provides a snapshot of a particular historical moment of party development and the party’s reactions to the dominant issues of the day. Taken together, the platforms reveal the evolution of party ideology and policy shifts in response to new issues and constituencies (Gerring 2001).

To both situate Reagan’s and Trump’s environmental policies in political history and chart the evolution of Republican environmental ideology from the seventies to the present, I undertake a content analysis of the Republican Party platforms from 1976 to 2016.^{Footnote 5} I assume that American political parties are indeed ideological and that these ideologies have both dynamic elements and stable ideational cores that can be traced through time (Gerring 2001). In analyzing the platforms, I focus on how the Republican Party approaches governance of the environment, specifically how it frames environmental protection and its overall approach to environmental issues (rather than treatment of specific environmental issues). By examining Republican Party platforms across four decades, I seek to capture how the Party’s environmental ideology has changed over time. A set of overarching questions guided my analysis: (1) How is environment presented overall, and how is it related to other national priorities and values? (2) What aspects of environmental governance is the Party critical of? (3) What is the Party’s positive program for environment? And, (4) how does the Party view the role of government in environmental protection, and to whom does it attribute responsibility for environmental protection?

The Republican Party’s late twentieth century platforms are separated into thematic sections, with section headings and section order changing from platform to platform. My analysis focuses primarily on the environment and natural resources sections of the platforms, but also includes analysis of the preambles and sections that address the Party’s overall approach to governance (which may shape and contextualize its approach to environmental governance). My methodological approach contains four steps. First, I read each platform in order to isolate passages relevant to my analysis.^{Footnote 6} After aggregating these passages, I then coded the passages that addressed the Party’s (1) overarching statements about the environment and its relation to other national priorities and values, (2) critiques of existing environmental policy approaches, (3) positive program for environmental protection, and (4) view of the role of government and other entities in environmental protection. Once organized in these categories, I examined the rhetorical shifts between the platforms and looked for ideational patterns. Finally, I periodized (situated in historical time) the patterns and drew conclusions about the character of ideological change.

Analysis of Republican Party platforms from 1976 to 2016 reveals continuities, but also ideological evolution, between the environmental ideologies of Reagan’s and Trump’s Republican Parties. The core ideological commitments of Reagan Republicanism on environment—deregulation, cost-benefit analysis of environmental regulations, and devolution of environmental authority to states and localities—were actually embraced by the Party in the 1970s and are reflected in the 1976 platform (Republican Party Platform 1976; Layzer 2012). These core conservative principles remain at the heart of the Party’s environmental ideology to the present. However, over the past four decades, the Party has shifted its position on environment in ways that have dramatically impacted the policies it espouses. I periodize this history in three eras—1976–1988, 1992–2008, and 2012–2016—based on the content of the Party’s environmental ideology. In the period 1976–1988, the Party, in its efforts to rein in environmental regulation, relied on the strategy of questioning the cost of regulations and advocated deregulation and cost-benefit analysis. From 1992 to 2008, the Party took a different tack; it explicitly attacked the regulatory model of command and control. In its place, the Party pushed market mechanisms and privatization, which, it argued, could more effectively and efficiently achieve environmental protection. The Party’s rhetoric shifted in the 2012–2016 platforms. These platforms largely dropped promotion of environmental protection and extended the conservative critique of regulation to a condemnation of the environmental administrative state and the EPA in particular.

Though the platforms of 1976–1988 affirm the need for federal environmental protection, each raises questions about the cost and extent of federal intervention. The platforms employ a rhetorical strategy of calling for “balance” between environmental protection and economic growth as a rationale for deregulation. The 1976 platform proclaimed, “a clean and healthy natural environment is the rightful heritage of every American,” but also asserted that “Americans are realistic and recognize that the emphasis on environmental concerns must be brought into balance with the needs for industrial and economic growth” (Republican Party Platform 1976). The 1980 platform affirmed that “a healthy environment is essential to the present and future well-being of our people, and to sustainable national growth,” but stressed that “environmental protection must not become a cover for a ‘no-growth’ policy and a shrinking economy” (Republican Party Platform 1980). The 1980 platform recognized that the “nature of environmental pollution is such that a government role is necessary” and “much progress” had been made in controlling pollution, but immediately pivoted to calls for the review of environmental regulations “to ensure that the benefits achieved justify the costs imposed” and reform of regulatory procedures to “expedite decision-making” (Republican Party Platform 1980). Though other sections of these platforms call for devolution of authority to states and localities, the 1988 platform is the first to apply this principle to environmental policy, recognizing “the necessary role of the federal government only in matters that cannot be managed by regional cooperation or by levels of government closer to the people” (Republican Party Platform 1988). Overall, the platforms of this period reveal a Republican Party ambivalent about environmental regulation. Neither willing to overtly reject the role of the federal government in promoting environmental protection, nor willing to jettison environmental regulation entirely, the Party sought to balance environmental protection and economic growth, at least in its rhetoric. From the 1970s to the 1980s, there was a conservative shift on environment evident in the Party’s calls for reducing regulation and instituting cost benefit analysis in government decision-making, but the Party did not directly dispute the value of environmental protection.

The Republican Party’s calls for deregulation and devolution, developed in the 1976–1988 era, formed the lasting foundation of its environmental ideology. But, by 1992, the Party’s rhetoric had shifted emphasis. The 1992–2008 platforms developed an aggressive counter-narrative to environmentalism, explicitly embraced the libertarian values of private property preeminence and economic freedom, and promoted market mechanisms and privatization as alternatives to command and control regulation. The 1992 and 1996 platforms were particularly combative and partisan. They accused Democrats of using “junk science to foster hysteria instead of reason, demanding rigid controls, more taxes, and less resource production” (Republican Party Platform 1992), charged unnamed entities with hijacking environmentalism and making it “anti-growth and anti-jobs” (Republican Party Platform 1992), and condemned “[f]earmongering and centralized control” (Republican Party Platform 1996). The 1992 platform rhetorically linked environmental protection, economic progress, and private ownership, claiming that “environmental progress is integrally related to economic advancement,” “economic growth generates the capital to pay for environmental gains,” and “private ownership and economic freedom are the best security against environmental degradation” (Republican Party Platform 1992). By 1996, the environmental section of the platform contained a subsection titled, “Securing Property Rights,” and the platform asserted that “Republicans consider private property rights the cornerstone of environmental progress” (Republican Party Platform 1996). This new emphasis on private property both as inviolable and as a means of achieving environmental protection carried through every subsequent platform. Still nominally affirming the importance of environmental protection, the Party explicitly attacked the command and control approach to environmental regulation. In response to the costly, “inflexible,” “outdated,” and “failed” command and control approach, the Party called for market-based approaches and privatization (Republican Party Platforms 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008). While not abandoning the goal of environmental progress, the Party sought to supplant command and control regulation and rely on technological development and private ownership as drivers of environmental improvement.

In 2012, the Party’s rhetoric on environmental regulation dramatically changed as it engaged in an explicit attack on the environmental administrative state. It dropped support for federal regulation through market mechanisms, instead criticizing all federal regulatory efforts and advocating privatization and devolution of regulatory authority to states. The 2012 platform initiated a direct attack on the EPA (it contained a new section titled “Reining in the EPA”) and condemned “activist regulators,” “EPA’s war on coal,” and Obama’s “job-killing combination of extremism and ineptitude” (Republican Party Platform 2012). The 2016 platform extended this attack, asserting that the EPA should be turned into an independent bipartisan commission. It discredited the administrative state as “[u]nelected bureaucrats in the executive branch” who “write countless rules with the force of law and arbitrarily punish individuals who disobey those rules,” and promised to “strictly limit congressional delegation of rule-making authority” (Republican Party Platform 2016). In characterizing the Obama Administration’s environmental policy as “an avalanche of regulation that wreaks across our economy and yields minimal environmental benefits,” the 2016 Republican Party positioned itself as hostile to the very idea of environmental regulation, rather than the form that environmental regulation has taken, as it had in the past (Republican Party Platform 2016).

Overall, the 1976–2016 platforms reveal a Republican Party discontent with the extent to which the 1960s and 1970s environmental laws intruded into the economy and the breadth and depth of federal control. However, the Party’s response to this discontent was not static; over time, we see Republicans embracing new rhetoric and policy prescriptions. While there are elements of continuity over these four decades, the platforms of 2012 and 2016 represent a new, more strident anti-environmental discourse. Situated in this historical context, the anti-environmentalism of Trump’s campaign and the Trump Administration is not an aberration. This analysis shows that the Trump Administration’s approach to the environment emerges from an increasingly conservative Republican Party. The 2016 platform drew on conservative principles, like deregulation, that had been a foundation of the Party’s critique of environmental regulation since 1976, and also embraced and expanded new conservative rhetoric pioneered in the 2012 platform.

Situating this analysis in the context of the comparison of Reagan’s and Trump’s executive actions on the environment reveals an important difference between the Reagan and Trump eras. While Reagan engaged in an explicit attack on environmental policy, the Republican Party platforms of 1980 and 1984 were more moderate in their environmental ideologies. They expressed concern for environmental problems and validated the government’s role in addressing them, while at the same time calling for less regulation and cost benefit analysis. This distinction indicates that the Party as a whole was not fully behind the Reagan Administration’s targeting of environmental regulations as part of its deregulatory agenda. In the Trump era, this distinction between the president’s actions and the Party’s rhetoric has collapsed. The Trump-era Republican Party is united behind Trump’s explicit attacks on the environmental state, and indeed, the Party’s more extreme anti-environmental rhetoric preceded Trump’s nomination. Trump’s campaign rhetoric attacking “job-killing regulations” and Obama’s “war on coal” was already a mainstay of the Party in the 2012 platform. While both Reagan and Trump actively undermined the premise that environmental regulation is good for society through their policy actions, the rhetoric and ideology of the Party as a whole is now united around this goal. This shift in the Republican Party’s environmental ideology makes the Trump presidency and unified Republican control of congress a much more dangerous prospect for environmental policy. The question now is, how likely is environmental policy retrenchment, not only through executive action, but also through legislative reforms? The next section explores obstacles to environmental policy rollback.

In characterizing the development of American environmental policy over the twentieth century, Christopher Klyza and David Sousa describe “a slow, uneven movement in directions generally favored by greens,” what they call “green drift” (Klyza and Sousa 2013, 40). They argue that we have not seen substantial environmental policy rollback even in periods of unified Republican control for two reasons. First, the legal and institutional architecture of the “green state” is remarkably resilient. Once institutionalized, federal environmental laws and the agencies in charge of implementing them are very difficult to dislodge for both practical and political reasons. Environmental laws passed by congress require a majority (and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate) to overturn, which is nearly impossible to muster in the era of congressional gridlock. Presidents can unilaterally roll back environmental regulations established by their predecessors, but not with equal ease. While executive orders are easy to revoke, presidents face substantial procedural hurdles in rescinding existing rules that guide agency action. Rules proposed by administrative agencies must go through the rulemaking process, which mandates a notice and comment period in which the proposed changes are publicized and the public is given an opportunity to provide feedback directly to administrators on the proposed changes. When a president directs an administrative agency to overturn finalized rules, the agency must go through this same process. In drafting the final rule, the agency must take into consideration the public comments and justify its proposed actions. This process to make and rescind rules is heavily litigated. As a result, the process of unwinding and replacing rules can be so arduous that an administration ultimately fails, as occurred with George W. Bush’s proposed reversal of Clinton’s Roadless Rule (preventing road construction and timber harvesting on over fifty million acres of national forest land). The public response alone may be enough to thwart rule change, though the recent case of Secretary of Interior Zinke’s proposed changes to a handful of national monuments despite receiving 2.4 million public comments, the vast majority of which opposed the changes, raises questions about the utility of public input (Arrieta-Kenna 2017).^{Footnote 7} The slow pace of the rulemaking process also gives environmental advocacy groups time to mobilize opposition.

Second, environmental advocacy groups, bolstered by a public that remains supportive of existing environmental laws, defend environmental gains when they are threatened (Klyza and Sousa 2013). Environmental groups have two primary instruments to oppose environmental rollback—appeals to the public and litigation. Given the sensitivity of presidents and members of congress to reelection concerns, constituent pressure is an efficacious tool in thwarting executive and legislative attacks on environment. Reagan’s actions on environmental policy led to a dramatic increase in the membership and strength of environmental advocacy groups (Dunlap 1987). Between 1980 and 1990, the Sierra Club’s membership increased from 180,000 to 600,000, and the Wilderness Society’s membership grew from 45,000 to 350,000 (Kraft 2000, 30). Public support for the environment, already high in the 1970s, also increased during Reagan’s tenure (Dunlap 1987; Kraft 2000, 30). Environmental groups were able to effectively mobilize public concern over Reagan’s environmental attacks in his first term, such that the Administration took a more moderate approach leading up to the 1984 election (Layzer 2012, 113). The environmental backlash that Reagan faced led George H. W. Bush to pursue a much more moderate approach to environmental issues in his 1988 campaign. However, Bush pivoted to the right on environmental policy as the 1992 election approached in an appeal to industry and an increasingly conservative Republican Party (Layzer 2012; Daynes and Sussman 2010).

Environmental advocacy groups have also used the courts extensively to stymie executive attacks on environmental policy. Provisions in many 1960s and 1970s environmental laws, as well as the Administrative Procedures Act, give citizens, and, by extension, environmental advocacy groups (and states), the right to sue federal agencies when they fail to fulfill their congressionally-mandated duties. If a president instructs administrative agencies to relax environmental rules in ways that contravene their statutory mandates, then environmental groups take to the courts. In response to the Reagan Administration’s deregulatory efforts, environmental groups routinely sued the EPA and the Department of the Interior, with substantial success. The courts rejected Watt’s attempts to weaken surface mining regulations and Gorsuch’s withdrawal of Carter-era rules regulating shipping terminal air pollution (Layzer 2012, 113). Environmental groups used litigation to block rollback in subsequent Republican administrations, with notable successes under the George W. Bush Administration.

Appraising the eight years of the Reagan Administration, New York Times reporter Phillip Shabecoff concluded that the worst fears of environmentalists were not realized thanks to congress, the courts, and public opinion (Shabecoff 1989). Under Reagan and every subsequent Republican president, conservatives failed to repeal or fundamentally change any of the nation’s major environmental laws (Layzer 2009). The central question of this moment in environmental political history is whether the bulwarks against rollback—both through executive and legislative action—will continue to hold. Will the stickiness of environmental policies and institutions obviate major statutory and institutional changes? Will congress, the public, environmental advocacy groups, and the courts act to guard environmental gains in the face of the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll them back? Will there be a public backlash to Trump’s attacks on environmental policy, and will this backlash be substantial enough to drive voters to the polls in 2018 and 2020? Changes in the political landscape over the past ten years throw Klyza and Sousa’s conclusions into question.

While this analysis reveals continuities across the Reagan and Trump Administrations, the political context has changed. Moderate congressional Republicans, along with congressional Democrats, were essential to preventing the extensive environmental deregulation advocated by the Reagan Administration. The bipartisan majority that passed the strong environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s remained largely intact in the 1980s. Congress rejected most of Reagan’s anti-regulatory proposals, blocked many of the Administration’s initiatives, and frequently criticized the actions of Watt and Gorsuch. Congress countered Reagan’s executive moves by allocating more funds to environmental programs than the Administration requested, like appropriating funding for park expansion against the wishes of Watt, and blocked agency initiatives, like Watt’s plans to open wilderness and wildlife refuges to oil and gas development (Layzer 2012, 115). Congress also insulated some existing environmental laws from executive manipulation, as in the 1982 reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act, and wrote more detailed and demanding environmental statutes in order to prevent the president from sabotaging environmental policy during implementation (Layzer 2012, 115; Kraft 2000). Congressional oversight was particularly important for EPA’s administration of the hazardous waste program. Enforcement efforts rose sharply following congressional investigations of the program and increased budget allocations (Wood and Waterman 1991). Due to congressional criticism and public outcry, both Watt and Gorsuch were forced to resign by the end of 1983.^{Footnote 8} During the Reagan Administration, congress not only guarded environmental gains, it also strengthened existing environmental laws through new legislation, including major amendments to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability (Superfund) Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, most of which was grudgingly signed into law by Reagan, facing veto-proof majorities (Layzer 2012, 127–120). Most of this congressional action occurred with Republican control of at least one house of congress.^{Footnote 9} But, since the 1980s, the partisan landscape has been transformed.

Though our party system has become increasingly polarized since the mid-1970s, surges in partisan polarization and ideological sorting since the 1990s have resulted in Democratic and Republican parties that are farther apart on the political spectrum and more ideologically uniform than at any point in the twentieth century (McCarty et al., 2006). Although both parties have moved farther toward their ideological poles, contemporary partisan polarization is largely driven by the Republican Party becoming more conservative (Barber and McCarty 2013; Hare and Poole 2014). The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 pushed the Party even farther right, expanding the conservative end of the Party’s ideological spectrum. Today, the Republican Party has far fewer moderates, who are more conservative than in the past (McCarty et al., 2006). Partisan polarization has broad consequences for American governance, including decreased bipartisanship and legislative gridlock. These changes have also had profound effects on environmental policy. As the Republican Party has become more conservative, its support for environmental policy has waned. As analysis of the Republican Party platforms shows, while the Republican Party in the 1980s acknowledged the positive impacts of environmental regulations, but called for controls to ensure the efficiency of regulations and minimize impacts on the economy, the contemporary Republican Party has become hostile to the existence of federal environmental protections. The Party as a whole has embraced the anti-environmental views of its most conservative members (Cahlink 2017). Since the rise of the Tea Party, the issue of climate change has become a litmus test for Republicans to prove their conservative credentials, and, as a result, concern for climate change has plummeted among congressional Republicans (Broder 2010; Davenport and Lipton 2017a). Analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning policy and advocacy organization, found that 59% of House Republicans and 73% of Senate Republicans in the 115th congress are “climate deniers” (Moser and Koronowski 2017).^{Footnote 10}

Given the overall conservatism of the Party and its unified control of the presidency and congress, the Republican Party arguably poses the gravest threat to environmental protection than it has at any other time in American history. However, moderating conditions will likely prevent the wholesale dismantling of existing environmental laws through legislative action; the Republican majority faces internal fractiousness and resistance from congressional Democrats. The 115th congress has demonstrated a stunning inability to pass legislation (the failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act is the case in point). As the Party has grown more conservative, more Republican members of congress hold strongly conservative views, yet some powerful moderates remain. The result is a Party divided internally by factions with divergent interests, unable to marshal enough Republican votes to pass major legislation. Even when leaders are able to hold the coalition together, they do not have the votes in the Senate to overcome a Democratic filibuster. The Senate may avoid the filibuster by passing legislation through the budget reconciliation process (which limits floor debate to twenty hours), but only legislation related to federal spending, revenue, or the debt limit can be passed through the reconciliation process and reconciliation can only be used three times in a budget year. Given partisan polarization and the Democratic Party’s commitment to environmental protection, it is extremely unlikely that congressional Republicans could entice Democrats to join them in voting for any significant dismantling of environmental law.

Despite the fact that we are unlikely to see substantive environmental policy rollback by congress, Republican control of congress does matter for environmental policy given congress’ role in checking executive action. Here, the difference between congressional Republicans in the 1980s and now is crucial. As analysis of Republican Party platforms demonstrates, the Republican Party is largely on board with Trump’s anti-environmental agenda, and has shown little appetite for challenging Trump on far more controversial issues.^{Footnote 11} Despite Scott Pruitt’s stated hostility to the EPA’s mission, only one Senate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against his confirmation. The Party’s stand on climate change precludes criticism of Trump’s moves to rescind the Clean Power Plan and pull the USA out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Republican representatives have, for the most part, applauded the Administration’s push to open public lands to increased resource extraction. There are, however, signs of push back against Trump’s proposed budget cuts to environmental programs. In a June 2017 House appropriations subcommittee hearing, Republican Representative Mark Amodei of Nevada remarked to EPA head, Scott Pruitt, “You may be the first person to get more than you asked for, because, quite frankly, as many people have made the point, nobody is standing on the rooftops begging for dirty water and dirty air and dirty soil and those sort of things” (Leber 2017). Moreover, the proposed cuts target some programs that are regionally important, like the Great Lakes Program, or financially important to districts, and members of congress from affected states will defend these programs out of self-interest (Akin 2017; Flavelle et al. 2017). But, beyond these budget protests, congressional Republicans are unlikely to act to constrain Trump’s anti-environmental agenda.

If congress is unwilling to hold the line on environmental protection, then the task falls to the public, environmental advocacy groups, and the courts. Though the public continues to support environmental protection by wide margins, trends over the past three decades have led to a partisan split, particularly on climate change. Egan and Mullin (2016) argue that the strong consensus on environmental protection among both Democratic and Republican voters has given way in this era of partisan polarization. They find that partisan polarization on environment outstrips that of all other issues they measured. While, in 1988, citizens in both parties showed nearly equal support for federal spending on environment, by 2012, 56% of Democrats favored increased spending on environment, compared to 21% of Republicans (Egan and Mullin 2016). The environment also suffers from low issue salience. In the 2016 election, environment ranked eleventh of issues “very important” to voters (Pew 2016).^{Footnote 12} The issue of climate change is acutely affected by these trends. Public opinion on climate change has become increasingly polarized since the mid-1990s, and currently the partisan gap on climate stands at more than forty percentage points (Egan and Mullin 2017). Climate change also has low salience compared to other social issues, and even compared to other environmental issues, like pollution (Egan and Mullin 2017). Despite the facts that public opinion on a variety of environmental issues is at odds with the Trump Administration’s actions and a majority of Americans support regulating carbon dioxide, these issues are unlikely to significantly influence voting outcomes due to their low salience for voters (Guskin 2017; Egan and Mullin 2017).

With a congress and public unlikely to act, environmental groups and the courts will serve as the primary bulwarks against executive environmental policy retrenchment. Environmental groups have already been vocal and active in opposing the Trump Administration’s policies. Using their most efficacious tool, environmental groups have brought lawsuits against the Trump Administration at every turn. Suits have been filed challenging the Department of Interior’s decision to lift the moratorium on coal leasing on federal lands, EPA’s decision not to ban chlorpyrifos, and Trump’s executive order on reducing regulations and regulatory costs, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and decision to expand offshore drilling, among many others. By June 2017, 50 federal lawsuits had been filed by environmental groups (Leavenworth 2017). Environmental groups are not shy about publicizing this strategy; the Center for Biological Diversity displays a lawsuit tracker on their website, with information on each suit they have filed against the Trump Administration (Center for Biological Diversity 2017). State attorneys general are also leading the litigation drive (Bravender 2017). Under this administration, any anti-environmental decision that can be litigated will be litigated. The outcomes of these lawsuits will depend on the positions of reviewing courts. Given the partisan nature of the federal judiciary, we should expect both wins and losses depending on the ideological lean of the reviewing court (Wenner 1982; Keele and Malmsheimer 2016). However, should any of these cases make it to the Supreme Court, their fates are far dimmer due to conservatives’ continuing dominance on the Court (with Gorsuch replacing Scalia).

What should we expect moving forward? My analysis suggests that though we are unlikely to see the repeal or reform of major environmental laws, we will see significant environmental retrenchment through executive action, likely exceeding that of Reagan. Environmental laws will likely remain unaltered given that Republicans will face a Democratic filibuster for any substantive environmental policy reforms they propose, though Republicans could make smaller policy changes through riders. Institutional inertia and public support will prevent something as severe as the abolishment of the EPA, but not the weakening of administrative agencies through a thousand small cuts. Environmental advocacy groups and the courts will continue to function as bulwarks against major policy changes. The public, too, may contest the Trump Administration’s actions if citizens begin to see negative consequences associated with lower levels of enforcement of environmental regulations, find their experiences of public lands threatened by new development, or feel the impacts of climate change in ways that motivate political action. The 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential election will reveal where the public stands on the Republican Party’s anti-environmental agenda, among many other issues. If the Trump Administration is a test of the public’s commitment to environmental protection, it is even more so a test of the Republican Party’s anti-environmental rhetoric. Over the next three years (or until they lose their majorities) we will see whether Republicans in congress are willing to walk their anti-environmental talk through legislative action.

This analysis shows that Republican presidents are able to significantly affect environmental policy using their executive powers. Though presidents cannot abrogate federal environmental laws, executive control of the bureaucracy allows presidents to manipulate policy implementation and enforcement in ways that can dramatically shift policy outcomes. Moreover, Republican presidents and congressional Republicans have been able to stymie environmental policy development in new areas, most notably in federal policy to address climate change. Appraising the Reagan Administration in 1984, Kraft and Vig concluded that the president got most of what he wanted despite roadblocks presented by congress, the public, environmental groups, and the courts. The Administration “succeeded in reducing the size, scope, and effectiveness of environmental agencies,” resulting in “substantial policy change at the agency level” and “relatively few new regulations” (Kraft and Vig 1984, 437). This assessment opens the possibility that even if congress and the public were to reengage in defense of existing environmental protections, the Trump Administration could still substantially impact environmental policy, at least for the next three years, and perhaps beyond.