President-elect Donald Trump’s attack on the Biden administration’s climate agenda begins in three days.
How much survives the initial assault is still unclear. But Trump has made it clear that a purge is coming.
On his first day, Trump could sign somewhere between 50 and 100 executive orders, with more expected over the following weeks, said Stephen Moore, who served as Trump’s senior economic adviser on the campaign. A first target will be rolling back the climate-focused executive order that President Joe Biden signed a few days into his term, he said.
“I do anticipate many of them will be energy focused, because a lot of what Biden did was through executive order on energy,” Moore said. “So a lot of them would be rescinding things like the EV mandate and some of the environmental rules will be softened and some of the funding of the green energy programs will be lifted.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Executive orders can be just as much a political message as they are an actual policy. Biden used an early flurry of executive orders to reorient the White House around addressing climate change — and to make it clear that boosting the clean energy industry and cutting carbon emissions would be among his top priorities in office.
Executive orders cannot change a law or regulation, but it seems likely that Trump will attempt to do so anyway, said David Hayes, who served as a senior climate adviser in the Biden White House and helped draft climate-related executive orders. Some of Trump’s initial executive orders may overstep their legal authority and get immediately bogged down in court, he said.
“The President doesn’t have the authority to essentially ignore the legally required process that typically is involved in a major change in direction for an agency under its congressionally authorized and mandated mission,” Hayes said.
Some of the forthcoming executive orders will become legislative priorities for the GOP-controlled Congress. Others may not survive the different battling constituencies that make up Trump’s new governing coalition, particularly since Republicans have only a razor-thin advantage in the House.
One early point of tension is Trump’s desire to repeal the entirety of the Inflation Reduction Act — a move opposed by both oil companies and at least 18 Republican members of the House.
On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to be a “dictator” on Day 1 when it came to oil and gas production. The executive orders that he begins to roll out next week will be the first step in that process, but they’re still largely “symbolic,” said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell.
“All of these environmental and energy executive orders are going to be symbolic in nature or agenda setting,” Maisano said. “The details, the specifics, the process, will all have to be undertaken to implement.”
Here are some of the expected orders that could start rolling out in the hours after Trump is inaugurated on Monday.
Eliminate the White House climate adviser
Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to return as head of the Office of Management and Budget, was an architect of Project 2025, the 900–page conservative policy blueprint organized by The Heritage Foundation. He has spent the past four years crafting hundreds of executive orders that Trump could issue on his first day in office.
One of them would eliminate the role of the White House climate adviser. Vought has also proposed eliminating the Domestic Policy Council in the White House.
Instead, Vought’s plan, as written in Project 2025, would put in place a senior aide reporting directly to incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles to “lead the fight for sound energy and environment policies both domestically and internationally.”
That aide would focus on cutting climate and environmental regulations to help boost domestic oil and gas production with as few restrictions as possible. Their focus would be to ensure the White House helps meet the fossil fuel industry’s needs, and to that end they would coordinate the work of the Council of Environmental Quality, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Security Council, the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council.
Begin reversal of EPA power plant rules
Early executive orders may also signal how and when the new administration plans to undo key elements of Biden’s climate regulatory regime — including EPA’s new pollution limits for power plants.
Biden’s EPA finalized tough new standards for coal-fired power plants and newly built gas generation last year. Industry challenges to the rule are ongoing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard oral arguments on it in December but has yet to issue a decision.
Trump’s early directives might provide clues about how quickly his administration will move to rescind and replace those standards — which depend on carbon capture and storage technologies that the fossil fuel industry says aren’t ready for prime time.
Revise or roll back methane rules
An executive order might also tease changes to EPA rules to rein in heat-trapping methane leaked at new and existing oil and gas facilities. EPA published a standard last year that some industry groups support, but still hope to tweak. Another target is a related Interior Department measure to tighten limits on gas flaring on federal lands.
The petroleum industry broadly is less keen on a congressionally mandated fee on excess methane, which takes effect this March based on last year’s emissions. The American Petroleum Institute in its recent “roadmap” for a second Trump term argued that EPA’s plan to implement the fee “misinterprets Congressional intent, and does little beyond increasing the cost of production for American oil and natural gas.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced a bill on Tuesday to repeal the levy. Trump could boost that effort by mentioning it in an executive order.
The EPA under Trump is also likely to revise Biden-era tweaks to greenhouse gas reporting rules for oil and gas.
Target electric vehicles
Trump vowed to end an electric vehicle “mandate” on his first day in office. While there’s no actual mandate, Trump could issue an executive order signaling his intent to target EPA’s latest round of car regulations, which are designed to encourage the use of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.
He could also go after California’s long-standing authority under the Clean Air Act to write its own regulations for car and truck emissions. California’s Advanced Clean Car II plan, which has been adopted by 11 other states and the District of Columbia, would phase out most gas-powered cars by the mid-2030s.
“Energy was on the ballot in the last election,” American Petroleum Institute President Mike Sommers told reporters on a conference call this week. “And EV policy and the policies pursued by the Biden administration, I think, were roundly rejected by American voters.”
Trump tried addressing both those priorities in his first term, but the effort largely stalled. Since then, EVs have grown from a niche market to roughly 10 percent of new car sales. While the rate of growth has slowed, carmakers sold a record number of electric models in 2024.
Try to roll back fuel economy standards
Republicans and the oil industry have railed against the Department of Transportation’s decision to increase the mileage requirements for cars and trucks, known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards.
During his first term, Trump tried to roll back the Obama administration’s CAFE standards, and his supporters have urged him to do the same for the Biden administration’s standards, which were finalized in June.
The rules would raise the fleetwide average from nearly 47 miles per gallon in 2026 to 50.4 mpg in 2031. Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary, Steven Bradbury, has written that the standards are “pure fantasy” and are intended to promote electric vehicles.
An executive order could signal the beginning of an effort to roll back those rules.
Lift the pause on new LNG export permits
Trump has long promised to immediately lift a pause on new LNG export permits that the Biden administration implemented to conduct an economic and climate assessment. The resulting analysis, released last month, found that “unfettered” shipments of the fuel would make domestic prices rise.
Trump has faced growing pressure from industry executives to take action. Questions over the role of U.S. natural gas exports, both to China and U.S. allies, have featured prominently in confirmation hearings this week for several of his Cabinet nominees.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said he hopes a reversal of the pause is something the Trump administration addresses on Day 1.
“That’s another example of Biden administration policies that just appear to be very anti-energy, frankly,” he said during an event this week hosted by the American Petroleum Institute. “Making America more of a resource supplier, not just for American needs but also for our allies around the world, makes the world safer and less dangerous.”
The U.S. became the world’s largest LNG exporter during the Biden administration.
Exit the Paris climate agreement
Trump is expected to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement for the second time.
That would put the U.S. among just a few nations that aren’t party to the 2015 accord. The announcement of a Paris exit may be included as part of a Day 1 executive order. The Trump administration would then need to notify the United Nations in writing of its intention to withdraw, which would take a year to become official.
America’s first exit from the agreement took months for Trump to announce due to resistance from some close advisers and Cabinet members. But this time, the president hasn’t deliberated the value of staying in the pact, and none of his advisers or Cabinet nominees appear to have swayed him to reconsider.
“Everybody is for getting out,” said Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team in 2017 and was a proponent of the Paris exit. He argues that Trump should submit it for the Senate’s approval as a treaty, which is unlikely, thereby making a withdraw more lasting.
Legal experts and former officials say the U.S. negotiated the agreement in such a way that the president could enter it as an executive agreement without requiring the advice and consent of the Senate, something that would be difficult to achieve given Republican opposition.
A withdrawal means the U.S. will drop any pledges it has made under the pact, including promises of climate aid for developing nations and the Biden administration’s latest pledge to cut emissions up to 66 percent by 2035.
Restrict wind development
When Trump held a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this month, he railed against wind projects, saying “we’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built.”
The comments reinforced the perception that the incoming president will take action to restrict wind development, particularly projects built offshore in federal waters. But exactly what form that executive order takes remains the source of considerable speculation.
Many observers expect Trump to halt leasing new tracts of land and ocean for wind development, and to pause reviews for projects currently in the midst of a permitting review. But many projects in the permitting and leasing stages are likely years away from starting construction, lessening the practical impact of such orders.
The bigger question is whether Trump will go after projects that have already been permitted by the federal government and have, in some instances, already begun construction.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) told The Associated Press that he discussed an executive order with Trump about a month ago that would pause offshore wind activities along the East Coast for six months so the Interior Department could review permits issued to projects.
Onshore wind projects face less risk because many are built on private or state land, but Trump could stall developments on federal land.
Reporters Jean Chemnick, Mike Lee, Sara Schonhardt and Benjamin Storrow contributed.
