From the day he began his second term in January 2025, President Donald Trump and his administration have embarked on an unprecedented effort to upend U.S. environmental protection law and end policy to address the climate crisis. But advocates and states that favor action mounted an immediate counter-offensive in the courts.

Inside Climate News is watching the progress of federal court cases on Trump climate and environmental policy—both challenges to and cases launched by the administration.

Courts largely reined in the environmental rollbacks of the first Trump administration, but such outcomes are less certain in his second term. Trump appointees hold 28 percent of federal judgeships, including three of the nine seats on the Supreme Court. Trump’s appointees have embraced new legal doctrines that envision a limited role for federal regulators.

This chart tracks the current state of play, based on all of the substantive decisions in the cases so far. The outcomes tracked include rulings on preliminary legal issues, such as whether to put temporary holds on Trump administration actions while the cases are decided. The tracker does not include rulings on procedural issues, such as extensions of time or stays in proceedings. If a judge specified a motion was granted in part and denied in part, Inside Climate News counts that as a mixed ruling.

This table shows all of the cases being tracked by Inside Climate News. Those with the most recent decisions are at the top of the list. We will track these cases from initial trial or district courts, through any appeals, and to the Supreme Court if they are heard there.

The selection of cases draws heavily from the climate litigation database of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. The list also includes additional cases that don’t address climate policy directly, but raise relevant environmental justice and preservation issues. These include the lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s siting of a migrant detention camp in the Everglades. Readers can follow the link on the case name for more information at CourtListener, a nonprofit legal research website, which has one of the largest collections of freely available federal court documents online. CourtListener also provides links to PACER, the federal courts’ public access system, where documents are available for a fee. 

This chart, categorizing cases into the broad issues being litigated, provides a window into the variety of means the Trump administration has used to upend climate policy. Federal grants cases are challenges to several agencies’ termination of programs such as the environmental justice funding opportunities that were made available in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Energy cases include challenges of actions taken to reshape the nation’s energy mix, such as Trump’s “energy emergency” executive order, stop-work orders on offshore wind projects and a presidential proclamation that exempted some coal-fired power plants from toxic pollution rules. Transparency lawsuits include challenges to the purging of agency web sites and the establishment of a secret climate science review committee.  

The list of cases and outcomes will be updated regularly. Inside Climate News welcomes feedback on the scorecard. Use this form to contact our team.

Peter Aldhous

Peter Aldhous is a science and data reporter based in San Francisco. He got his break in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature in London, fresh from a Ph.D. in animal behavior. Later he worked as European correspondent for Science, news editor for New Scientist and chief news & features editor with Nature, before moving to California in 2005 to become New Scientist’s San Francisco bureau chief. From 2015 to 2022 he worked on the science desk at BuzzFeed News. Peter also teaches investigative and policy reporting, data visualization, and news features writing in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a two-time winner in the Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards. His reporting has also been honored by the Association of British Science Writers, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Royal Statistical Society.

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  @peteraldhous.com
  

Marianne Lavelle

Bureau Chief, Washington, D.C.

Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.

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  @mlavelles
  
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  [email protected]