The Trump administration will likely have a tougher time defending in court its plan to relax fuel efficiency standards for cars because of new evidence showing that federal agencies were internally divided over whether weaker rules would save lives.
“It strengthens legal challengers’ arguments that this was a political, and not a technical, decision,” Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia University, told the Washington Examiner.
Career experts at the the Environmental Protection Agency disagreed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, on the number of deaths that would be avoided by rolling back stringent fuel-efficiency and emission targets set by the Obama administration, according to hundreds of pages of documents released Tuesday.
The two agencies ultimately both put their names to a joint proposal released Aug. 2 that says a freeze in the fuel standards could prevent 1,000 fatalities from crashes annually.
But scientists from EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality had privately warned in June that computer modeling used by NHTSA was flawed and argued that the rollback would actually increase annual traffic fatalities, by an average of about 17 deaths per year.
Legal experts say EPA’s questioning of NHTSA’s methodology will bolster the argument of legal opponents who say the Trump administration has failed to justify its plan to weaken fuel standards with science-based facts.
“If there are just disagreements between the agencies, it would not be so troublesome,” Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School’s environmental law program, told the Washington Examiner. “But the fact the disagreement seems to hinge around the very methodology NHTSA used, which the EPA sort of did a reanalysis of, is really what creates a big vulnerability. The documents show the very tools NHTSA relied on are unreliable.”
The contested proposal represents one of the most significant reductions of former President Barack Obama’s effort to combat climate change. Last year, carbon dioxide emissions from transportation became the most polluting source in the U.S., passing the electricity sector.
The Obama administration argued that mandating greater fuel efficiency for vehicles would improve public health, counter climate change, and save consumers money without risking safety. It estimated that stricter standards would lead to about 100 fewer auto-related deaths.
California and 17 other states have already sued the Trump administration for rejecting the Obama administration’s fuel-efficiency rules and beginning the process of weakening them.
Attorneys general of those states accuse the Trump administration of flouting the Administrative Procedures Act by not backing up their policy proposal with proper rationale.
The Trump administration argued the Obama program, set in 2012, forcing automakers to double the fuel economy of their vehicles to reach an average of roughly 54 miles per gallon by 2025, would make cars and trucks more expensive and encourage people to keep driving older, less safe models. It also said people using higher-efficiency cars would decide to drive more because they would need to refuel less, increasing their odds of a traffic accident.
A freeze in the fuel standards could prevent 1,000 fatalities from crashes annually and save Americans an average of roughly $2,340 for every new vehicle purchased, the Trump administration claims.
With that logic, the Trump administration made a choice with its proposal by deciding that road safety is more important than the potential harms of allowing vehicles to continue burning more fuel.
But EPA’s internal analysis found that freezing the Obama rules would increase fatalities, cost thousands of jobs, and reduce social benefits by $83 billion.
EPA, the released documents show, said NHTSA’s projections inflated by millions how many outdated vehicles would be driven as a result of increasing fuel efficiency standards.
“The safety argument was never a strong one and EPA pointed that out,” said David Hayes, the executive director of the State Energy and Environment Impact Center, a coalition representing liberal attorneys general suing the Trump administration over the proposal. “The administration has a very high mountain to overcome the extensive administrative record that shows the benefits of increased fuel economy and lower emissions, and the safety argument does not provide the rationale the administration needs to blow up the deal,” Hayes told the Washington Examiner.
But other legal experts say there is no formal legal doctrine that internal disagreement within the executive branch implies that a rule is arbitrary.
John Graham, dean of the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said NHTSA’s conclusion on traffic safety should carry more weight since it is a component of the Department of Transportation.
“NHTSA has far more expertise on safety risks than EPA does, so I doubt EPA’s skepticism will matter,” Graham told the Washington Examiner.
