Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration has pursued one of the most aggressive deregulatory campaigns in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rolling back rules on soot pollution, methane emissions, and greenhouse gas reporting. In February 2026, the EPA formally rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding—the legal opinion underpinning nearly all federal greenhouse gas regulations—arguing that under the Clean Air Act, the agency lacks the statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
The response from the environmental justice bar was swift. Six days after the announcement, a coalition of public health and environmental groups sued the EPA over the rescission of the Endangerment Finding, which they claim is unlawful. In early April, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit alongside a coalition of environmental organizations and Alaskan tribes, arguing the repeal was scientifically indefensible and procedurally unlawful. The Supreme Court had already rejected the EPA’s argument nearly two decades earlier in the landmark case Massachusetts v. EPA, which ruled the Clean Air Act allowed the agency to regulate emissions.
“With this action, [the] EPA flips its mission on its head,” Earthjustice senior attorney Hana Vizcarra said in a press release in February. “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.”
This legal resistance is not being led primarily by the large, well-funded national environmental organizations that dominate press coverage, such as Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. It is being carried out by a coalition anchored in environmental justice law—attorneys and legal organizations working directly with tribal nations, rural communities, and low-income communities of color who were organizing against pollution long before the current administration’s rollbacks began. The strategy is not centered on press conferences or public campaigns, but on a slower, more granular kind of resistance: filing motions, building administrative records, and forcing federal agencies to justify their actions in front of judges rather than cameras.
The centerpiece of this legal campaign is Appalachian Voices v. EPA, a case that illustrates both the promise and the volatility of courtroom resistance under a judiciary reshaped by the Trump era. In June 2025, a coalition of fifteen nonprofits, the Native Village of Kipnuk, and seven local governments—represented by Earthjustice, the Southern Environmental Law Center, Lawyers for Good Government, and the Public Rights Project—filed a class action lawsuit after the EPA abruptly terminated between $2.8 billion and $3 billion in environmental and climate justice block grants Congress had authorized and mandated under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The coalition initially sought a preliminary injunction to force the EPA to immediately reinstate the funding. In August, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that because the grantees’ claims were essentially contractual in nature, they belonged before the Court of Federal Claims—a specialized court that can award money damages against the federal government but generally cannot order an agency to resume payments—rather than a district court, which can issue that kind of injunctive relief, and denied the request for a preliminary injunction in the process.
The ruling permitted the government to cut off funding to all 350 grantees nationwide who had been counting on the money for pollution reduction, climate resilience projects, and community capacity-building work. Among the organizations affected is the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, which has represented low-income communities of color in California’s Central Valley for decades—work that depends on the federal environmental justice funding streams now stuck in litigation.
The coalition successfully appealed the decision in part on the grounds that the Trump Administration moved to eliminate the program in February 2025, despite the statute mandating its existence remaining in effect until September 2026. Last month, the D.C. Circuit vacated the district court’s decision, reviving the challenge to the EPA’s grant terminations. The ruling does not restore the $3 billion in funding outright, but it keeps the case—and the possibility of a return in funding—alive, sending it back to the district court to address the claims it originally dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.
Not every case in this legal campaign has followed the same uncertain, multi-year trajectory as Appalachian Voices. In a separate but related case, a federal judge in Maryland ruled in June 2025 that the EPA had unlawfully canceled $180 million in Congressionally authorized funding for environmental and public health projects administered by three regional organizations under the agency’s Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program. The three organizations had been selected in 2023 to distribute the funds across fifteen states and 315 federally recognized tribes.
Judge Adam B. Abelson found the EPA’s termination to be in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act and contrary to the Clean Air Act, under which Congress had specifically set aside funds for environmental justice programs.
“[The] EPA contends that it has authority to thumb its nose at Congress and refuse to comply with its directives,” Abelson wrote in his ruling.
Abelson’s decision has become a touchstone for attorneys arguing that the EPA’s broader rollback strategy is not just politically aggressive, but often legally sloppy, vulnerable to challenge precisely because the agency has moved too quickly to build a defensible administrative record. The Indigenous Environmental Network, which has organized tribal communities around opposing oil and gas pipeline projects and around advancing environmental sovereignty more broadly, has continued tracking this litigation as it moves through appeal, alongside the Native American Rights Fund, even though their own constituencies were not the direct plaintiffs.
In a parallel case, Idaho v. EPA, environmental justice litigation extends beyond funding fights into the realm of tribal sovereignty. But Idaho is not a challenge to a Trump-era rollback. In May 2024, Idaho, joined by twelve other states, sued to dismantle the EPA’s Tribal Reserved Rights Rule, which requires states to account for tribal treaty water rights when setting water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. The states argue the rule—finalized by the Biden Administration just weeks before the lawsuit was filed—unlawfully forces them to consider tribal treaty rights, such as rights to fish, hunt, and gather, that they say fall outside the EPA’s authority to impose on state water regulators. Because the rule predates the current administration, and because Trump’s administration has shown little appetite for defending a Biden-era policy, the burden of defending it in court has fallen largely to the tribes themselves rather than to the agency that issued it. The Native American Rights Fund, co-counseling with Earthjustice, has intervened to defend the rule on behalf of twelve tribal nations, including the Nez Perce Tribe and the Quinault Indian Nation, positioning a frontline tribal legal organization to defend a federal rule that Trump’s EPA itself has been reluctant to fight for.
“Tribal rights must be protected and accounted for when setting state water quality standards; it is a legal and moral obligation,” Daniel Cordalis, NARF staff attorney and director of its Tribal Water Institute, said in a press release. “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.”
The environmental justice bar is not just fighting the EPA; it is also adapting to a Supreme Court that has narrowed the tools available to challenge federal agency action nationwide. The Court’s June 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. held that federal courts likely lack the authority to issue injunctions that block universal enforcement of executive actions. As the Public Rights Project put it in its own case analysis, the ruling means that “state and local governments will have less ability to push back against federal actions that harm their communities.”
Responding to the decision, Earthjustice said in a statement that “the most common remedies that we seek to protect the environment and people’s health—tailored injunctions and invalidation or ‘vacatur’ of illegal federal actions—were not affected by the Court's ruling,” adding that “class actions provide a vehicle for pursuing broad relief, albeit at a much slower pace and at a much greater cost. We are fully prepared to bring more of them.”
That shift has forced attorneys at Earthjustice, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and allied organizations to rely more heavily on certified class actions like Appalachian Voices and on targeted relief tailored to specifically named plaintiffs rather than sweeping, nationwide injunctions. Attorneys who once could seek a single ruling to protect communities across the country now have to build case-by-case factual records, identify certifiable classes, and argue threshold jurisdictional questions before ever reaching the merits of whether the EPA’s actions were lawful. That procedural terrain favors an administration with virtually unlimited legal resources and disadvantages under-resourced environmental justice firms, even when their underlying legal arguments are strong.
Several fronts will define this fight through the remainder of 2026. With the D.C. Circuit’s July 2026 ruling reviving the Appalachian Voices case, the district court must now grapple with the claims it previously avoided by ruling on jurisdictional grounds alone—a process that could still end with the grants restored, or could still ultimately steer grantees toward the Court of Federal Claims, a venue with narrower available remedies and no path to broad injunctive relief.
Meanwhile, Idaho v. EPA continues to generate rulings that attorneys on both sides are studying closely for signals about how courts outside Washington, D.C. are likely to treat future EPA rollback challenges and tribal rights claims. This is a live and unresolved question, given how differently district courts have ruled depending on geography and the ideological composition of the bench.
Together, these cases underscore a pattern that has emerged across this two-year legal campaign: Environmental justice attorneys, often representing tribes and frontline communities, have found genuine but narrow footing in federal court, winning specific battles over funding and procedure. The pattern suggests less a clean courtroom victory than a grinding, incremental resistance, consisting of wins on discrete grant terminations, revived appeals on jurisdictional dismissals, and a long fight ahead over the legal architecture of federal climate authority itself. It is a resistance being waged not by the household-name environmental groups, but by the lawyers who were already embedded in these communities long before Washington began rolling back the rules meant to protect them.