Environmental groups are quickly getting in formation to play defense against an incoming Trump administration, recognizing that often they’ll be best situated to effectively push back through the use of the courts.
The range of activities includes reviewing the legal and legislative strategies used in President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office and scrutinizing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook—which most environmental groups believe the new White House will hew closely to.
The previous Trump administration often favored fossil fuel development over environmental conservation and climate policies, and it’s largely expected to pursue a similar agenda when it returns in January.
For the groups advocating for climate, environmental, and public health issues, mounting a strong defense will come down to hiring more staff. Earthjustice has some 215 litigators on staff, making it one of the nation’s biggest environmental law firms. But Abigail Dillen, the group’s president, said that might not be enough going forward.
“I think we’ll need more good lawyers to get the work done,” she said. “I suspect the Trump administration will be so emboldened that there will just be more to do.”
Some of those new hires will probably have to be constitutional specialists, given that the Supreme Court has shown an increasing willingness to get involved in environmental cases, Dillen said.
Other legal skills will likely crop up that can’t yet be anticipated, depending on what the Trump administration does, she said.
“Think about the last time, when the emoluments clause came up,” Dillen said, referring to a pair of cases that reached the Supreme Court regarding presidential corruption. “There wasn’t a cadre of experts on that. So we’ll need smart lawyers who understand government, understand the statutory constructs, the balance of powers, and the powers of agencies.”
Similarly, Lawyers for Good Government—a coalition of 125,000 pro bono lawyers across the nation formed in 2016 in anticipation of Trump’s first presidency—is looking for “lawyers in a lot of different areas of practice,” said Jillian Blanchard, director of the group’s climate change and environmental justice program.
“It’s going to be exhausting to protect the rule of law,” Blanchard said.
Lessons Learned
Advocacy groups say they’re better prepared to do battle with Trump, having spent four years tangling with him.
To Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the lessons from Trump’s first term is that environmentalists shouldn’t try to compromise and search for common ground on policy.
“At first there was hope that Trump would be a president for everyone, but by the end of the first six months we saw that wasn’t going to happen,” Hartl said. “So people should not be under the illusion that he’s interested in common ground. That should be the working assumption and premise.”
But playing defense also means being reactive, so it’s generally too early to make specific plans, Hartl said.
“We don’t yet know who Trump wants to run the EPA or Interior,” Hartl said. “Is he going to bring back the seasoned veterans from the first administration or have Joe Rogan and Kid Rock running agencies?”
Still, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers a detailed game plan for the incoming administration, even though Trump distanced himself from the document on the campaign trail, according to Dillen. The document calls for a broad unwinding of Biden’s climate agenda, including withdrawing from international climate treaties, weakening the Clean Air Act and National Environmental Policy Act, and expanding fossil fuel development.
“That won’t be all of what a Trump administration tries to do, but it gives the flavor,” Dillen said. Some of those actions will be “extreme and hard to justify based on the facts and the law, and what we’ve learned is, we can be quite successful in that category of cases,” she said.
Other actions listed in Project 2025 contemplate attacks on science and efforts to eliminate statutorily-mandated programs, which creates “a new set of problems to grapple with,” Dillen said.
Projecting Confidence
Environmental groups can also seize on the post-election moment to drive member engagement and donations, said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club.
“That’s what we always do—communicate to our communities about why Sierra Club is the best club to invest your time, your talent, your treasure, your work, your wisdom in changing the world for the better,” Jealous said.
Like his peers, Jealous also said he’s confident in his group’s ability to fight back. The Sierra Club brought 300 lawsuits in Trump’s first term, “so that gives us a great sense of optimism about what we can do on defense.”
Similarly, the National Resources Defense Council averaged a lawsuit against the Trump administration once every 10 days for his entire first term, winning in nearly 90% of the resolved cases, said Michael Wall, the group’s chief litigation officer.
“We have been preparing for this possibility for months, and NRDC’s lawyers are ready to fight any illegal actions again,” Wall said.
The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.