President Donald Trump’s executive orders have put climate policies enacted under the Biden administration in limbo. A growing number of these orders — from personnel moves to spending freezes — have been blocked by federal courts. Many have asked whether a president has the authority to make these kinds of moves at all, given the Constitution’s limitations.
The Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier spoke with Abby Andre, a former lawyer in the environmental enforcement section at the Department of Justice. While at the DOJ, Andre prosecuted the BP Oil Spill and other cases. She’s a former professor at the Vermont School of Law and is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental sociology at Ohio State University.
LISTEN to their conversation
Reid Frazier: Looking at what the Trump administration has done on environmental policy since Inauguration Day. What stood out to you the most?
Abby Andre: I think what stood out to me the most is how fast he’s moving and how aggressive his actions are, not just at dismantling policy but disregarding people. Every administration comes in with their own policy objectives, and that’s understood. And the administration has the power to, to some extent, sculpt the executive branch to enact those policies.
What they don’t have the power to do is whole cloth, wholesale fire civil servants who act regardless of political party for both sides to further the law of the land. And that’s exactly what he’s done, is come in and dismantled programs and thrown these folks into chaos.
Abby Andre is a former lawyer in the Department of Justice in its environmental enforcement section and a former law professor. Photo: Abby Andre
Reid Frazier: The Trump administration is reassigning people in agencies, including those who work in the Environmental Enforcement Office of the EPA and the Department of Justice, where you worked. What does that office do? And what effect could these reassignments have?
Abby Andre: In our DEA’s mission, the Environment Natural Resource Division of the DOJ, is to protect the health and welfare of America’s people. Manage our precious natural resources and conserve our nation’s breathtaking landscapes.
It’s about 600 people, about 500 lawyers, and they represent the government in cases involving everything from pollution to public lands, wildlife, tribal sovereignty. They do all of these things.
ENRD is also responsible for some of the largest environmental cases in U.S. history. They bring force to the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, Superfund. It was responsible for Deepwater Horizon, the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Folks who followed this, the Tiger King was sued by the DOJ under the Endangered Species Act.
When we lose them, it’s a huge loss of expertise. It’s a loss of unbiased legal advice and guidance for political appointees. But it’s also a loss of protection for people in the United States who rely on DOJ. And they’re really excellent teams embedded in agencies to protect us from pollutants and other threats to the environment.
Reid Frazier: If you eliminate these jobs, how are environmental laws like the Clean Air Act going to be enforced?
Abby Andre: My first guess is that from the DOJ side, things will slow down substantially. And in fact, Trump has already paused EPA’s cases. So the cases referred to the DOJ for litigation are not moving anywhere right now.
But I think more disturbing than that is the impact on investigation. On the agency side, EPA and other agencies responsible for public health have incredible teams of specialists and scientists who respond to citizen calls to investigate things like illness in Flint, Michigan, following the lead pipe crisis there, exposures that people may experience following things like the train derailment in East Palestine.
You know, we rely on more than we know these agencies for their expertise. And when they find a problem and a violation, often they refer it up to the DOJ. Who has the authority to bring it to court? So there’s a real interlocking relationship between what’s happening at EPA and at DOJ.
Reid Frazier: On another front, Trump has tried to assert his right to freeze millions or even billions of dollars of congressionally appropriated spending on programs that were funded under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. One question most of us are having right now is can he do this?
Abby Andre: Can he do it? No, on a couple of levels. He doesn’t have the power to impound funds appropriated by Congress. The Supreme Court has said this over and over again. It was litigated everyone thought, I think with finality during the Nixon administration. Nixon was the last president to try to kind of line-item veto policies and programs.
In response, Congress created something called the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which lets Trump impound funds but only in the tiniest circumstances. He can ask Congress to rescind appropriated funds, and then they’re not rescinded and frozen until Congress chooses to do so.
Or he can delay the funds until later in the fiscal year, but not on a policy basis, only on the basis that he needs money now for something else. So he’s going to delay the funds until later.
He cannot unilaterally freeze funds. It’s also a violation, arguably, of Article II , of Article I of the Constitution. And and it’s been made incredibly clear by the Supreme Court that the president can’t block agency programs he doesn’t like by freezing money. The Line Item Veto Act was viewed as unconstitutional.
So every time a president has tried to do this from Nixon to Carter, now Trump, and it’s got up to the Supreme Court, they have said, ‘No, you cannot impinge upon Congress’s power of the purse in this way.
Reid Frazier: What effect are all these early actions taking on environmental policy or what effect might they take long term?
Abby Andre: The immediate effects that we’re seeing is particularly in smaller programs, smaller NGOs who are already having to fire people. There’s a program down in New Orleans called Thrive New Orleans that was awarded $500,000 to teach poor and minority high school students how to protect communities from extreme heat and flooding. In an interview of the the director of that program said that he was going to have to start firing people almost immediately.
So many of these small startup programs, their main source of funding is from these grants. So you’ll see the grassroots folks hit first and hardest.
But then you also are seeing states stopping actions under things like the national electric vehicle infrastructure program, the EV infrastructure program which Trump has issued a halt on. A few states are continuing and saying that they’re going to pay the contracts that they already made committed to, but others are stopping.
So the immediate effect is confusion and this kind of patchwork response, but also job loss and real anxiety among folks who are really trying to better their communities and protect their communities.
Long term, we’ll see more fossil fuel investment, leasing, production [and] permitting, even though we had the highest [oil and gas] production ever for this country last year. The Trump administration has declared a national emergency based on energy production and suggests that all agencies look at their laws to find ways to streamline.
So I suspect more [fossil fuel] production and less clean energy production and infrastructure overall, less climate change readiness overall, and a growing disparity between communities who are able to cope with a change in climate and communities who are not.
Abby Andre is a former lawyer in the environmental enforcement section at the Department of Justice and a former professor at the Vermont School of Law.
