# Trump’s environmental rollbacks are being struck down by courts > Source: > Published: 2026-08-21 16:40:05+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...**By Zahra Hirji, Bloomberg** The Trump administration’s many steps to reshape and shrink the scope of federal environmental protection have been met with a flood of legal challenges from companies, environmental groups and state officials. So far this summer, it’s been losing more than winning in court. Over the past three months, federal courts nationwide have delivered rulings in several cases centered on attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to terminate billions of dollars in climate grants and roll back Biden-era air policies. In more than half of them, the judges decided against the agency. Some of those lawsuits remain unresolved. The EPA is looking to appeal some of the cases it lost — or already has, according to agency spokesperson Brigit Hirsch. “The Trump EPA is committed to following the law, and courts have affirmed our rules and actions in a variety of contexts,” said Hirsch. “These wins rarely get the same attention in the media as short-term losses.” But lawyers involved in the litigation challenging the EPA say recent court decisions represent a crucial backstop to the Trump administration’s aggressive pullback on environmental work. “The tide feels like it is shifting,” said Jillian Blanchard, an attorney at Lawyers for Good Government who represents multiple organizations who lost environmental grants last year. The usual way a federal agency goes about rescinding an existing regulation is through a time-intensive process that involves proposing a new rule and taking public comment before issuing the final version. That’s not how the Trump EPA went about trying to roll back the Biden administration’s update to what’s commonly called soot standards. Instead of starting a new rulemaking process to weaken them, last fall the Trump administration tried to achieve that via an existing court case. When the Biden administration rolled out the new national standards in 2024, more than 20 Republican-led states sued to overturn them. The agency initially defended the stricter pollution standards in court, but under Trump, it reversed course. The Trump EPA told the court that it no longer believed the agency had the authority to update the soot standards when it did and asked the court to toss them. Instead, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in June ruled 3-0 to reaffirm the stronger standards. “We have an administration that is trying very, very hard to restrict the scope of its own authority,” said Jody Freeman, an environmental law professor at Harvard University not involved in the litigation. At least in this case, she explained, the courts disagreed. In a separate case, a federal judge in California in July ordered the Trump EPA to comply with a key legal deadline for implementing the soot standards, which it had ignored while the original case was pending. When asked about the recent decisions in both soot cases, Hirsch said the EPA “remains committed to implementing the Clean Air Act as written and is considering appropriate next steps.” The administration has had more success with smaller deregulatory moves. For example, in mid-July, the DC Circuit reaffirmed the Trump EPA’s approach to how refineries and other industrial facilities calculate their emissions and thus determine what pollution controls are needed. Later that month, the same court ruled to uphold the EPA’s extension of deadlines for steel mills to comply with certain hazardous emissions standards. Meanwhile, the EPA has repeatedly faltered in court on another front: its termination of multiple grant programs worth billions of dollars. It has prevailed in at least one case: This summer a federal judge in Washington state dismissed a multistate challenge to the agency’s cancellation of the $7 billion Solar for All program, saying it belonged in a different court. But the agency has been faring less well in others. A federal judge in South Carolina, for example, ruled earlier this summer that the EPA’s internal guidance to terminate the separate, smaller Environmental and Climate Justice grant program “was arbitrary and capricious and unlawful,” directing the agency to restart the program. The EPA is appealing the decision, and on Thursday won a stay from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to the July order reviving the grant program. The plaintiffs are winning, explained Blanchard, “whenever the cases get into a court to review on the merits — not on issues of jurisdiction technicalities of, does this belong in the Court of Federal Claims or district court.” In another grant case, the DC Circuit delivered another partial setback to the EPA this month. In March 2025, the EPA terminated roughly $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin alleging programmatic fraud and abuse. Some affected grantees sued and a district judge put in place a preliminary injunction halting the termination. After a three-member panel at the DC Circuit issued an initial 2-1 decision more favorable to the EPA, the full court made a new 6-4 ruling this month against the agency. The EPA said it intends to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court. “Delay is a problem, especially with climate action because the lost time is lost momentum to cut greenhouse gases,” said Freeman. 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