The Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act. The National Environmental Policy Act. These and most of our nation’s other foundational environmental laws were passed decades ago – and they have started to show their age. The Clean Air Act, for instance, was written to cut air pollution, not to drive the whole-of-economy response that the climate crisis now warrants. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 was designed to make cars more efficient in a pre-electric vehicle era, and now puts the Department of Transportation in the awkward position of setting fuel economy standards in an era when more and more cars don’t burn gas.

Trying to manage today’s problems with yesterday’s laws results in government by kludge. Legacy regulatory architecture has foundered under a patchwork of legislative amendments and administrative procedures designed to bridge the gap between past needs and present realities. Meanwhile, Congressional dysfunction has made purpose-built updates exceptionally difficult to land. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was mostly designed to move money rather than rethink foundational statutes or regulatory processes – because those rethinks couldn’t make it past the filibuster.

As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge. 

The second Trump Administration launched the biggest environmental deregulatory campaign in history against this backdrop. But that campaign, coupled with massive reductions in the federal civil service and a suite of landmark court decisions (including Loper Bright) about how federal agencies regulate, risks pushing U.S. regulatory architecture past the point of sensible and much-needed reform and into a state of complete disrepair.

Dismantling old systems has proven surprisingly easy. Building what comes next will be harder. And the work must begin now. 

It is time to articulate a long-term vision for a government that can actually deliver in an ever-more complex society. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is meeting this moment by launching an ambitious new project to reimagine the U.S. environmental regulatory state, drawing ideas from across ideological lines.

Fear of the risks of systemic change often prevent people from entertaining change in earnest. Think of the years of U.S. squabbles over how or whether to reform permitting and environmental review, while other countries simply raced ahead to build clean energy projects and establish dominance in the new world economy. Systemic stagnation, however, comes with its own consequences. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) are a case in point when it comes to climate and the environment. Together, these two pieces of legislation represented the largest global investment in the promise of a healthier, more sustainable, and, yes, cheaper future. Unfortunately, as proponents of the “abundance” paradigm and others have observed, rollout was hampered by inefficient processes and outdated laws. Implementing the IRA and the IIJA via old systems, in short, was like trying to funnel an ocean through a garden hose – and as a result, most Americans experienced only a trickle of real-world impact.

Similar barriers are constraining state progress. For example, the way we govern and pay for electricity has not kept pace with a rapidly changing energy landscape – meaning that the United States risks ceding leadership on energy technologies critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and combating climate change.

But we are perhaps now entering a new era. The United States appears to be on the edge of real political realignments, with transpartisan stakes around the core role of government in economic development that do not match up neatly to current coalitions. This realignment presents a crucial opportunity to catalyze a new era of climate, environmental, and democratic progress.

FAS will leverage this opportunity by providing a forum for debate and engagement on different facets of climate and environmental governance, a platform to amplify insights, and the capacity to drive forward solutions. Examples of topics ripe for exploration include:

• Balancing agility and accountability. As observed, regulatory approaches of the past have struggled to address the interconnected, quickly evolving nature of climate and environmental challenges. At the same time, mechanisms for ensuring accountability have been disrupted by an evolving legal landscape and increasingly muscular executive. There is a need to imagine and test new systems designed to move quickly but responsibly on climate and environmental issues. 
• Complementing traditional regulation through novel strategies. There is growing interest in using novel financial, contractual, and other strategies as a complement to regulation for driving climate and environmental progress. There is considerable room to go deeper in this space, identifying both the power of these strategies and their limits. 
• Rethinking stakeholder engagement. The effectiveness of regulation depends on its ability to serve diverse stakeholder needs while advancing environmental goals. Public comment and other pipelines for engaging stakeholders and integrating external perspectives and expertise into regulations have been disrupted by technologies such as AI, while the relationship between regulated entities and their regulators has become increasingly adversarial. There is a need to examine synergies and tradeoffs between centering stakeholders and centering outcomes in regulatory processes, as well as examine how stakeholder engagement could be improved to better ensure regulations that are informed, feasible, durable, and distributively fair. 

In working through topics like these, FAS seeks to lay out a positive vision of regulatory reconstruction that is substantively superior to either haphazard destruction or incremental change. Our vision is nothing less than to usher in a new paradigm of climate and environmental governance: one that secures a livable world while reinforcing democratic stability, through systems that truly deliver for America. 

We will center our focus on the federal government given its important role in climate and environmental issues. However, states and localities do a lot of the work of a federated government day-to-day. We recognize that federal cures are unlikely to fully alleviate the symptoms that Americans are experiencing every day, from decaying infrastructure to housing shortages. We are committed to ensuring that solutions are appropriately matched to the root cause of state capacity problems and that federal climate and environmental regulatory regimes are designed to support successful cooperation with local governments and implementation partners. 

FAS is no stranger to ambitious endeavors like these. Since our founding in 1945, we have been committed to tackling the major science policy issues that reverberate through American life. This new FAS workstream will be embedded across our Climate and Environment, Clean Energy, and Government Capacity portfolios. We have already begun engaging and activating the diverse community of scholars, experts, and leaders laying the intellectual groundwork to develop compelling answers to urgent questions surrounding the climate regulatory state, against the backdrop of a broader state capacity movement. True to our nonpartisan commitment, we will build this work on a foundation of cross-ideological curiosity and play on the tension points in existing coalitions that strike us all as most productive.

We invite you to join us in conversation and collaboration. If you want to get involved, contact Zoë Brouns (zbrouns@fas.org).