Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has pushed one of the most sweeping attacks on Environmental Protection Agency authority in the agency’s history.

His administration has targeted safeguards for soot, methane, and greenhouse gas reporting, treating public health rules like pesky paperwork for powerful polluters.

In February 2026, the EPA rescinded its 2009 Endangerment Finding, the legal foundation for nearly every federal regulation of greenhouse gases.

The agency claimed the Clean Air Act does not authorize it to regulate emissions from motor vehicles, despite the Supreme Court rejecting that argument in Massachusetts v. EPA nearly two decades ago.

Environmental and public health groups answered within days.

Earthjustice later joined environmental organizations and Alaska tribes in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, arguing that the repeal was scientifically indefensible, legally unsupported, and procedurally unlawful.

“With this action, [the] EPA flips its mission on its head,” Earthjustice senior attorney Hana Vizcarra said.

“It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so.”

Much of this resistance is being driven by environmental justice lawyers working alongside tribal nations, rural residents, and low income communities of color.

Rather than chasing television cameras, these attorneys are filing motions, assembling administrative records, and forcing the Trump administration to explain its reckless decisions before judges.

Appalachian Voices v. EPA has become a central test of that strategy.

Fifteen nonprofit organizations, the Native Village of Kipnuk, and seven local governments sued after the EPA canceled between $2.8 billion and $3 billion in environmental and climate justice grants mandated by Congress through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

A federal district court initially dismissed the case, finding that the dispute was contractual and belonged before the Court of Federal Claims.

That specialized court can award monetary damages, but it generally cannot order an agency to restart payments, leaving hundreds of grant recipients stranded while the administration celebrated another act of bureaucratic sabotage.

The canceled grants had supported pollution reduction, climate resilience, and community organizing across the country.

Groups including the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, which has represented communities in California’s Central Valley for decades, suddenly saw crucial federal support trapped in litigation.

In July 2026, the D.C. Circuit vacated the lower court decision and revived the challenge.

The ruling did not immediately restore the money, but it returned the case to district court and preserved the possibility that communities could recover funding Congress expressly ordered the EPA to distribute.

Another lawsuit produced a more direct victory in Maryland.

In June 2025, Judge Adam B. Abelson ruled that the EPA unlawfully canceled $180 million for environmental and public health projects serving fifteen states and 315 federally recognized tribes through the Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program.

“[The] EPA contends that it has authority to thumb its nose at Congress and refuse to comply with its directives,” Abelson wrote.

His ruling exposed a recurring weakness in Trump’s deregulatory frenzy: The administration moves quickly, but its legal homework often looks like it was scribbled during recess.

The legal struggle also reaches tribal sovereignty. In Idaho v. EPA, Idaho and twelve other states are challenging a rule requiring state water quality standards to account for tribal treaty rights, including rights to fish, hunt, and gather.

Because Trump’s EPA has shown little interest in defending the Biden administration rule, tribal lawyers have stepped into the breach.

“Tribal rights must be protected and accounted for when setting state water quality standards; it is a legal and moral obligation,” said Daniel Cordalis of the Native American Rights Fund.

“For states to fight a practical and needed rule is frustrating because it shows the ongoing effort to subordinate Tribal rights in state water management.”

These attorneys are also navigating a Supreme Court that keeps narrowing remedies against executive abuse. After Trump v. CASA limited broad injunctions, the Public Rights Project warned that “state and local governments will have less ability to push back against federal actions that harm their communities.”

Earthjustice says targeted injunctions, invalidation of unlawful actions, and class actions remain available, though they require more time and money.

That leaves grassroots climate lawyers fighting community by community, grant by grant, and ruling by ruling.

Their victories may be narrow, but they are keeping billions of dollars, tribal rights, and federal climate authority alive while Trump’s EPA tries to convert an environmental watchdog into a concierge service for polluters.