A coalition of major health and environmental organizations filed suit against the United States Environmental Protection Agency on February 18, 2026, challenging the Trump administration's repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding — the legal cornerstone of virtually all federal climate regulation.
The Endangerment Finding, issued under the Obama administration, is the government's formal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. Under the Clean Air Act, that determination is not merely symbolic: it is the legal prerequisite for the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide from vehicles, power plants, oil and gas operations, and dozens of other sources. Without it, the agency loses its authority to enforce nearly every major climate rule on the books. To repeal it is not to weaken one regulation — it is to pull the legal foundation from under all of them at once.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin moved to repeal the finding earlier this month, calling it "the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach" and claiming it had led to "trillions of dollars in regulations that strangled entire sectors of the United States economy." That language signals the administration's broader ambition: not merely to pause climate enforcement, but to dismantle its legal foundation entirely.
The plaintiffs — which include the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Alliance of Nurses for a Healthy Environment, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity — filed their challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Their argument is scientifically grounded and legally direct: after nearly two decades of peer-reviewed evidence reinforcing the 2009 finding, the agency cannot reverse course without contradicting the science. "The agency cannot credibly claim that the body of work is now incorrect," said Brian Lynk of the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
The stakes extend well beyond the courtroom. The EPA's own analysis — released alongside the repeal — found that eliminating vehicle emissions standards alone would raise gas prices and force Americans to spend more on fuel. Broader repeal would cascade through regulations on stationary sources: power plant emissions rules, methane standards for the oil and gas sector, and industrial pollution limits would all lose their legal footing.
For public health advocates, the human cost is the immediate concern. Air pollution from fossil fuels contributes to cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and premature death — disproportionately in low-income communities and communities of color already burdened by industrial exposure. Dismantling the regulatory architecture that limits those emissions is not an abstraction for those communities. It is a matter of life expectancy.
The lawsuit lands at a moment of acute tension between federal environmental rollbacks and state-level resistance. California and a coalition of states have mounted separate legal challenges to the administration's vehicle emissions rollbacks, and the courts have become the primary arena for climate governance as Congress remains gridlocked.
In climate policy, as across environmental challenges, urgency must meet solutions — science demands action, but despair achieves nothing. The legal battle over the Endangerment Finding may ultimately determine whether the United States retains any federal mechanism for addressing the climate crisis, or whether that authority is effectively erased until a future administration acts to restore it. The science of greenhouse gas harm has not changed. What is being contested is whether the law must still answer to it.
