EDF, Allies Sue Trump EPA over Weakened Limits on Smog-Forming Pollution from Gas-Burning Power Plants

(March 16, 2026) Environmental Defense Fund and other groups filed a lawsuit today challenging the Trump EPA’s new rule revising Clean Air Act standards for pollution from gas-fired power plants – a rule that could mean more smog and soot in the air we breathe and that would, for the first time, completely ignore the value of human life and health in its cost-benefit analysis.

“The Trump EPA’s final standard for pollution from new gas-fired power plants is stunningly irresponsible. It ignores science and skews economics to establish unlawfully weak pollution limits that could result in even more harmful air pollution from power plants than the obsolete standards they replace,” said Noha Haggag, Senior Attorney for Environmental Defense Fund. “In this rule, the Trump EPA also admits that it will no longer calculate the benefits of protecting people, in this or any other standards – a jaw-dropping pronouncement that leaves human life and health with no official value at the agency at all.”

The Trump EPA’s final rule establishes weak and ineffective pollution limits for nitrogen oxide (NO_x) pollution from new gas-burning turbines that are used in power plants and industrial facilities – rejecting stronger standards proposed under the Biden administration that would have required many new turbines to use modern pollution controls. NOx is a main component of smog and soot, which cause asthma attacks, other serious heart and lung diseases, and early deaths. 

Under the Clean Air Act, EPA must review and revise NO_x standards every eight years to make sure they keep up with developments in pollution control technologies and practices. The Biden administration proposed revisions to the standard in 2024, the first major updates proposed to this standard in 18 years, in response to a separate lawsuit brought by EDF and Sierra Club to enforce EPA’s responsibility to update these pollution safeguards. 

However, the Trump EPA rule provides far less protection from NOx pollution than that proposed 2024 update – and in some cases makes the safeguards even weaker than the previous standards issued in 2006. The new rule also allows certain temporary gas turbines, which can be used at data centers, to pollute more NO_x than other sources.

Even worse, the Trump EPA’s final rule includes an announcement that the agency will no longer estimate the economic value of health benefits from reducing NO_x and other types of dangerous pollution, for this or any other Clean Air Act rules going forward. That means that EPA’s “cost-benefit” analyses will now consider only costs to industry and will officially ignore the value of saving people’s lives and protecting their health.

EDF and Sierra Club, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) and Clean Air Task Force (representing the American Lung Association, Clean Wisconsin and Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future) filed a petition for review today with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Five of the groups – EDF, Sierra Club, NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), Clean Air Task Force and Citizens for Pennsylvania’s Future – also filed a petition for reconsideration with EPA, pointing out that the final rule was so substantially different from the Trump EPA’s proposal that there was effectively no chance for public comment on many of the key issues in the rule.

“In the proposal, EPA quantified the present value of its proposed standards’ health benefits as ranging from $107 million to $505 million … But in the Final Rule, EPA abruptly abandoned its longstanding practice of evaluating the quantified health benefits – a decision it made without any advance notice or solicitation of comment, and without reasoned explanation,” the groups say in their petition. 

The petition also points out that by abandoning its long-established practices and refusing to consider the health benefits of reducing NOx pollution, “EPA disregarded decades of guidance from experts, its own formal economic analysis guidelines and a large body of empirical evidence documenting a strong relationship between pollution exposure, mortality and morbidity ….  Protecting public health and welfare is the central purpose of section 111 [of the Clean Air Act] … The Final Rule never explains …. why it is reasonable for EPA to provide no estimates whatsoever of the health impacts of its Final Rule.”