Attorney General Raoul Files Lawsuit Challenging Trump Administration’s Rollback Of Fuel Economy Standards
The Illinois attorney general and a coalition of 20 other states and jurisdictions allege the rule unlawfully weakens fuel-efficiency standards and disregards potential consumer savings and climate damages.
CHICAGO – Attorney General Kwame Raoul, as part of a coalition of 21 attorneys general, today filed a lawsuit against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) challenging its final rule that weakens corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for new passenger cars and light trucks.
In their lawsuit, Raoul and the coalition allege that the NHTSA’s new rule is contrary to law and that the NHTSA contravenes its mandate from Congress to set fuel-economy standards at its “maximum feasible” level. Instead, the NHTSA’s backsliding standards for the next five years will require less efficiency than what the U.S. automobile fleet achieved in 2021. Raoul and the coalition allege this rule is arbitrary, capricious, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act and Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s fuel economy rules and standards are intended to protect consumers and our planet,” Raoul said. “There is no reason the Trump administration should take those protections away and weaken fuel efficiency standards, costing consumers more money at the pump. I will continue to push back on nonsensical changes to already established rules that protect our environment.”
In 1975, Congress enacted the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which requires the NHTSA to establish “maximum feasible” fuel economy standards for new vehicles that reflect technological feasibility, economic practicability, the effect of other motor vehicle standards of the government, and the need to conserve energy. To set fuel economy standards, the NHTSA first models the current fleet’s performance and then considers what, if any, additional actions manufacturers could take to improve fuel economy in future model years.
In past rulemakings, including during the first Trump administration, the NHTSA started from a realistic baseline fleet that included the millions of electric vehicles that already existed on the nation’s highways and roads, and based fuel-economy standards on how additional technological improvements to gas-fueled cars could make that fleet more efficient. The NHTSA never based fuel-economy standards on mandating automakers to produce more electric vehicles or requiring consumers to buy them.
The final rule misinterprets the NHTSA’s statutory authority and improperly forces the agency to ignore the presence of millions of electric vehicles in the nation’s existing fleet, leading to a flawed, dramatically distorted analysis of the “maximum feasible” fuel economy level that the auto industry can achieve. Essentially, the NHTSA’s reinterpretation of the law means the federal fuel-economy program is unable to protect consumers against rising gas prices or the ongoing global oil shock.
Raoul and the attorneys general explain in their lawsuit that the NHTSA used defective analyses of vehicle affordability and sales, fleet turnover, fuel savings, and vehicle safety to make the rule look net-beneficial to society. For example, the NHTSA tries to ignore nearly $220 billion in lost fuel savings, which is money that drivers would have saved under the previous fuel economy standards. The lawsuit further alleges the NHTSA also refuses to consider hundreds of billions of dollars in future damages from climate change driven disasters, flouting the best science and research and effectively setting these costs at zero.
Finally, NHTSA’s rule will end the CAFE credit trading program in 2028, which will significantly harm electric vehicle industries that employ Americans and support the economy.
Joining Raoul in filing today’s lawsuit are the attorneys general of California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the cities of Chicago, Denver, New York and San Francisco.
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