Tariffs Struck Down, Erasing History & Climate Rule Revoked

15:37Dave Townsend:So this process got started shortly after President Trump was reelected and reentered the White House. And in March of 2025, he issued an executive order to restore truth and sanity to American history. And that was followed two months later by a secretarial order issued by Secretary Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, that essentially operationalized the president's executive order for all of the agencies in the Interior Department, including the National Park Service. And so had QR codes placed in national parks so that visitors could tattle on National Park Service employees if they found that the interpretation of the site was a little bit too left-leaning or, in their view, denigrated Americans.

16:18Dave Townsend:And that was followed by an order for National Park Service staff to assess everything in their interpretive inventories, whether it was related to race or gender or climate science. Anything that might run afoul of the secretarial order or the president's executive order, they were required to put that on a list and submit that list to the Interior Department. And those lists were filled out and then submitted over the course of the end of the summer of 2025. And then in the fall of 2025, we kind of went into a hiatus where we heard some things were being removed, other things weren't being touched.

16:53Dave Townsend:People were considering what was on the list. And then we got started with a bang in January when we saw the National Park Service take down the displays at the President's House at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. And we have also seen other signs that were taken down, a sign on sea level rise at Fort Sumter, signs about climate change at Acadia National Park, a couple of films, videos at Lowell National Historical Park in Massachusetts that talked about the pollution of the industrial era and the challenging work environment for some of those young women who were working in the mills in Lowell during the Industrial Revolution in this country.

17:30Dave Townsend:And we've seen signs about Native history and culture that have been removed from the Grand Canyon. And we're hearing stories, anecdotal evidence of the fact that there is a large list of sites out there, many of whom have commemorative or interpretive materials that are related to the African-American experience, either slavery or civil rights, that are on somebody's list. And we may yet see additional operations coming from the Trump administration, from the Secretary of the Interior, from the National Park Service to remove or erase or censor or sanitize elements of our shared national narrative as it is interpreted by our National Park Service.

18:04June Grasso:Is it any reference to slavery, LGBTQ rights, climate change, etc.? How are they deciding what's objectionable?

18:14Dave Townsend:Oh, that's a great question. There is no transparency in this process. And so as an advocacy organization, the National Parks Conservation Association is engaged in a game of whack-a-mole, where we've got something happening at Independence Park in one week, and then something happening at the Medgar and Murley Eversome potentially the next week. And so it goes. So there is no transparency. There doesn't seem to be any process. And sometimes we've got directives coming down from above, get rid of this, or we've got people in national parks who themselves are trying not to get in any kind of trouble thinking, all right, maybe we ought to take that down or that program that we were going to have on enslaved people in the Underground Railroad, maybe let's postpone that.

18:56Dave Townsend:But the challenge right now is we don't have a clear sense of exactly what's happening. So it makes it really difficult to react to that. What I can tell you is we know now that the word transgender has been scrubbed from National Park Service interpretation, and we know that it's been scrubbed from the interpretive arrays at the Stonewall Inn in Lower Manhattan. That was a site of the LGBTQ uprising in the summer of 1969 that launched the modern LGBTQ civil rights and human rights era. And that protest, that uprising, was led by transgender activists. And so they have been excised from the history of an event that they started and helped to organize and lead.

19:31Dave Townsend:And we are seeing also at the president's house and other places, it seems as if there are some folks in the administration who believe that restoring truth and sanity actually means getting rid of any references to anything related to race or gender or sexual orientation, labor, class, women's rights, or climate science that makes some people feel uncomfortable. So the idea is you take those things out of the interpretive array and you can go and have a fine time at any national park that you want to visit. And you will never have to learn anything or think critically about any issue because we are just going to look at the unfiltered, unalloyed progress of this country from start until the current time right now when it's been nothing but progress, progress, progress.

20:12Dave Townsend:And I would just round out those comments by saying this is an amazing country. We have a broad and diverse history. It's complex. I think the complexities are the things that make it interesting. We have joined with allies to defeat fascism. We have brought inspiration, political, scientific, cultural, to all parts of the globe. We've cured dread disease. And there are times when we have failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That's us, too. And so when it comes to national parks and historic interpretation, we want the full story to be told in our national parks because we can handle the truth and we've got to have that truth.

20:45June Grasso:And what are you hoping to accomplish with your lawsuit?

20:48Dave Townsend:The aim of our lawsuit is to just put a stop to history erasure and signage removal. Let's stop it. And then let's see if we can't, through other means, perhaps even legal means, reverse that trend and then repair what's been lost. So that's the purpose of the lawsuit. We want to stop any additional signage removal in the name of restoring truth and sanity to American history and our national parks.

21:08June Grasso:I take it you're hoping for more rulings like that from federal judge Cynthia Roof, who ordered the Park Service to restore the panels on slavery. She found the federal government doesn't have the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historical truths. And she said it echoes Big Brother's domain in George Orwell's 1984.

21:30Dave Townsend:That's exactly correct. Yeah. At this point in time, we have an administration right now that has taken this restoration of truth and sanity issue too far. And I think the judge in the ruling for the preliminary injunction spelled it out that the actions being taken by this administration related to the Philadelphia case are capricious and arbitrary. We certainly feel like that's the case nationwide with some of the things that have been removed. You know, it takes the National Park Service months and sometimes years to develop interpretive arrays and signage that get placed in national parks.

22:04Dave Townsend:They consult with historians and museum collection specialists and ethnographers and archaeologists and community members and dissident communities and historians from outside the agency to get together and develop really good, accurate, inclusive interpretation that will benefit the public and enlighten the public and enhance public knowledge about our history. What's happening right now is it seems that somebody is in charge of an algorithm that anytime it finds anything in a brochure on a National Park Service interpretive sign that mentions the word slavery or the initials LGBTQ, it gets yanked out or it gets flagged for removal.

22:39Dave Townsend:That's not a rigorous historical academic process. Again, we've got a very complex story. We benefit when we're able to learn about where we've come from and about the breadth and depth of the contributions that people from a variety of backgrounds have made to this country to make us the people that we are today.

22:57June Grasso:So you describe this as a game of whack-a-mole. You don't know where in what national park some information is going to be taken down. So even if you get a judge's order, how will that be enforced?

23:12Dave Townsend:Well, that's a good question. That is also something for the lawyers and the legal teams to figure out. And, you know, once a ruling is made, we would hope that everybody would abide by the law and by the findings. And the idea is we have at this point in time, a problem that goes well beyond signage. And I think that's the challenge that we've got right now and that we're trying to communicate to the public. So if, let's say, the installation about enslaved people that came with George Washington and served his family in Philadelphia when he was president, let's say those signs are removed and they stay down.

23:46Dave Townsend:We lose an opportunity at that site to have a conversation about the issue of slavery and its place in the founding era of this country. And let me tell you, George Washington, as our president, deserves a world of credit because he's the guy that helped to establish our democratic traditions. When he got to the end of his second presidential term, he was standing next to some people who were elbowing him and saying, you know, General, you know people with muskets. We know people with muskets. We can keep you in this position for as long as you'd like to be the supreme leader of this nation. And Washington, to his credit, said, no, I believe in civilian leadership and peaceful transition.

24:25Dave Townsend:We're going to have an election. We're going to let the next person come in and take over the presidency. So our democratic traditions extend to George Washington and his ability to be that self-effacing. And he was also a guy who owned several enslaved Africans. And I think we need to be at a place where we can walk, chew gum and think difficult thoughts all at the same time. And so what we hope through this lawsuit is to suggest to the administration and to the people in America that this is an important issue. We don't need to erase our history. We don't need to hide from our history. We benefit all of us by being able to think critically about things that happened in our past that still very much influence us to this day.

25:07Dave Townsend:So in that regard, the lawsuit starts with the notion of stopping history erasure and signage removal, but it goes well beyond that. It's a much more important and challenging issue that we're facing right now.

25:18June Grasso:Alan, I'm curious about something. So websites have been scrubbed of information about slavery, sexism, climate change, etc. Is that erased information stored somewhere so you can restore it right away when you get a judge's order? Or do you have to go through some other kind of process to develop the information again?

25:42Dave Townsend:It's a little bit like the novel Fahrenheit 451, where the people wander around in the woods and they've memorized all the poetry and the science and the literature. And they share those oral histories with young people so that at some point in time in the future, they can come back and maybe republish all the books that have been burned. We're not quite at that stage at this point in time, but we do have an organization called Save Our Signs. And we do have people who have taken photographs of websites and screen captures of websites. So we do have a sense of before and after. And I think there will be the ability to rebuild and repair.

26:16Dave Townsend:But I would also tell you this. There were some reports or some people who suggested that the National Park Service at the president's home in Philadelphia were ripping down these displays and maybe even tossing them into garbage cans. That's not what happened. They were taken down carefully. They have been put in a place whereby, as they have been ordered by a judge at some point in time, we hope to see them restored to their rightful place at the president's home, display on enslaved people. And so we do have ways that we can recover this information, even if it has been sanitized or erased from a website.

26:47Dave Townsend:But the lawsuit that we have initiated is to make sure that we don't lose anything else.

26:51June Grasso:It's so important to preserve our history. Thanks so much for joining me, Alan. That's Alan Spears of the National Parks Conservation Association. Coming up next, the legal fight over the EPA scrapping a major climate rule. I'm June Grosso, and this is Bloomberg.

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28:39Alan Spears:Effective immediately, we're repealing the ridiculous endangerment finding and terminating all additional green emission standards imposed. unnecessarily.

28:49June Grasso:It took less than a week for lawsuits to be filed over the EPA's elimination of the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health.

29:00Alan Spears:Don't worry about it because it has nothing to do with public health. This was all a scam, a giant scam.

29:07June Grasso:The so-called endangerment finding forms the basis for regulations to fight climate change and its revocation could unwind current air and climate rules. So a coalition of conservation and public health groups and a group of youth plaintiffs are challenging the repeal, saying it violates federal law and legal precedent. And more lawsuits are sure to follow on an issue that's likely to reach the Supreme Court. My guest is an expert in environmental law, Pat Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Pat, just how critical is this revocation of the endangerment finding?

29:48Alan Spears:It's huge and it's ugly and people do not fully understand just how devastating this action is going to be, not just for climate, but for public health and safety generally.

30:00June Grasso:And the endangerment finding came out of a landmark Supreme Court case in 2007. Right.

30:08Alan Spears:So it follows on the heels, of course, of Massachusetts versus EPA, which is still the law of the land, contrary to what Mr. Zeldin thinks. And in that decision, the Supreme Court not only held that greenhouse gas pollution is regulated under the Clean Air Act, the George W. Bush administration had taken the position it wasn't regulated. and they made many of the same arguments that Trump and Zeldin are making now. The Supreme Court rejected those. It was a five to four decision. And frankly, the majority in the Massachusetts case is no longer on the court. So that's what gives Trump some hope here.

30:46Alan Spears:And then secondly, the Supreme Court said, since you have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas pollution, if you make a finding that such pollution and the emissions that cause it endanger public health and welfare, You must regulate. You don't have any discretion not to regulate once you make a finding. And the Supreme Court made it clear that was a scientific finding. It wasn't policy. It wasn't even law, necessarily. It was a scientific determination that this kind of pollution is endangering people's health and welfare. So the science is absolutely crystal clear, and the danger is absolutely clear.

31:28Alan Spears:You can repeal the finding. You can't repeal the danger.

31:31June Grasso:There are two lawsuits and counting, one by a group of youth plaintiffs and another by a coalition of health and environmental groups. Tell us about their claims that the EPA's actions are illegal.

31:46Alan Spears:Well, they're first of all saying that Massachusetts versus EPA is the law. And as I said, it states very clearly that EPA has the authority to regulate. So now Zeldin is coming along and saying, well, no, we've looked at it again through the lens that we use. And our conclusion is that the best reading of the Clean Air Act is not the reading that the Supreme Court issued in Mass v. CPA, but our reading, which is we don't have any authority to regulate greenhouse gases. They're using kind of an originalist argument here. They're trying to say that because the Clean Air Act of 1970 was focused on initially localized pollution, the smog that people were breathing and so forth.

32:30Alan Spears:But it's not true that the Clean Air Act was limited geographically. We have multiple instances where the Clean Air Act has been used to tackle long-range pollution, not just acid rain, but ozone pollution, smog pollution, fine particulate pollution that floats across the United States from upwind states to downwind states. So this notion that the Clean Air Act was never intended to regulate anything in your immediate area of the air you're breathing is simply flatly wrong. That's never been the law. No case has ever said that. The Supreme Court has never said that. Only Zeldin is saying that.

33:12So the first argument is there really is no legal basis whatsoever for repealing the endangerment finding.

33:21Alan Spears:And of course, they also repealed immediately what we call the tailpipe standards, the mobile source standards, cars and trucks and so forth. They are the largest source of this kind of pollution and a lot of other pollution as well. So the notion that this isn't a significant category, that's another requirement of the Clean Air Act. You have to make a finding that there's a danger from these pollutants, but then you have to look at the sources of the pollutants and say those sources contribute to the danger. But if this is the largest source of greenhouse gases and these other pollutants, they surely contribute to the danger.

34:00Alan Spears:So there's no legal basis, no scientific basis, and there are lots of other arguments for why this finding is not based on the law.

34:11June Grasso:Particularly in light of Massachusetts versus EPA, why do you think the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, took this route?

34:20Alan Spears:Zeldin is counting on the current composition of the court. As I said, the majority that was in place in Massachusetts versus EPA is no longer there. It's much more conservative. So you have to look at, can Zeldon get the court to take review of this issue and reverse Massachusetts versus EPA? So this requires basically a headcount. Where do you get five votes on this court to overturn Mass versus EPA? You don't have the liberal wing of the court. You don't have Chief Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the dissent in Massachusetts, because he has stated publicly, even though I dissented, I think Mass versus EPA at this point is settled law.

35:07Alan Spears:It's been on the books for 19 years, right? Lots of reliance on that decision, lots of regulatory actions based on that decision, lots of industry actions in response to that decision. So you're not going going to get Chief Justice Roberts' vote. So where do you get the fifth vote? You've got the three or four, perhaps ultra-conservatives on the court. That would be Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and probably Justice Kavanaugh, although even that's not sure. So where does the fifth vote come from? It almost has to be Justice Barrett. And my view is that she's not going to go along with overturning Mass v.

35:50Alan Spears:CPA because of a doctrine that we call statutory stare decisis. So once the court has interpreted a statute, as opposed to, say, interpreting the Constitution, which can change over time, as we've seen, but when it comes to interpreting a statute like the Clean Air Act, the doctrine that that kind of precedent should not be overruled, or at least lightly overruled, is very, very strong. And I think Justice Barrett has the kind of sort of institutional integrity on the Supreme Court to respect that. So I don't see how they get Justice Barrett's vote.

36:30June Grasso:Pat, the Supreme Court has surprised us many, many times. So suppose they do get that fifth vote and Massachusetts versus EPA is overturned. Can that be undone by the next president and the next EPA?

36:46Alan Spears:That would have really devastating consequences because it would mean that a future president could not reinstate the endangerment finding. Once the court has determined there is no authority to regulate greenhouse gases unless Congress steps in, and that doesn't look very likely, that's the end of the ballgame. That's the end of federal regulation of climate polluting emissions. It's devastating.

37:12June Grasso:So then it seems like there's a danger in escalating this fight to the Supreme Court.

37:17Alan Spears:Oh, I think so. I mean, it's the old adage, be careful what you wish for. If Trump is successful in getting the court to agree with him, then what happens is the Clean Air Act no longer regulates these pollutants. But that means states like California are free to do so. And you can be sure they will. California has already adopted the most stringent tailpipe standards, fuel efficiency standards in the country, and 13 other states have gone along with California. That got overturned by Congress. That's another story. But the point is, once the Clean Air Act is no longer an obstacle to state regulation, it is no longer preempting California and other blue states from regulating these pollutants, not just from cars, but from lots of other sources as well, power plants, oil refineries, etc.

38:11Alan Spears:You know, that creates a patchwork of regulation across the country, chaos, because there'll be litigation over that as well. The one thing that industry hates is that kind of chaos, that kind of unpredictability. How do you make investment decisions in a regulatory environment like that? You know, the one thing about federal regulation is once it's in place, that's the baseline. That's what everybody can plan against, and particularly for automakers. So that's number one. If Trump wins, industry loses. Number two is the oil companies also lose because the oil companies have been somewhat successful getting state and city and county lawsuits against them for climate damage.

38:56Alan Spears:These are the so-called deception cases, public nuisance cases, more recently climate superfund cases, and so forth. And the oil companies are making the argument the Clean Air Act preempts all these lawsuits for damages. So if Trump wins the repeal of the endangerment finding on the basis that the Clean Air Act doesn't regulate these pollutants, their preemption argument goes out the window. So, you know, there are two really bad consequences from upholding what Zeldin has done, neither of which benefits industry, doesn't benefit automakers, doesn't benefit utilities. It just creates chaos.

39:37June Grasso:I'm wondering if there's a way for the plaintiffs here to slow walk these lawsuits so that they don't reach the Supreme Court during Trump's term.

39:48Alan Spears:That is the strategy, I think, of the environmental groups that have sued and the blue state attorneys general led by California and Massachusetts, which is sure to follow here shortly. I think that's their strategy. And slow walk, yes, there are some ways to do that. Number one, you can, you know, argue for a really long-term briefing schedule. Lots of issues here. There were 570 ,000 comments on this proposed rule. The APA requires EPA to respond to those comments. There's no way EPA has done that in the time frame that they've been working on that. So, you know, they're going to be vulnerable on any number of procedural issues.

40:33Alan Spears:So all of that means the briefing is going to be incredibly detailed. The page limits are going out the window. You know, they're going to double or triple the normal briefing that you're talking about. Plus, the administrative record. You can also be arguing that the record's not complete. Short of it is there are strategies and tactics that lawyers can legitimately use to stretch out the briefing, the argument, and so forth. Whether they can stretch it out for the full almost three years, that's an open question.

41:06June Grasso:So we'll keep watch for the motion practice to begin. Thanks so much, Pat, as always. That's Professor Pat Parenteau of the Vermont Law and Graduate School. And that's it for this edition of the Bloomberg Law Show. Remember, you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www.bloomberg.com slash podcast slash law. And remember to tune into the Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at 10 p.m. Wall Street time. I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg.

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