The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to erase its own foundational conclusion that planet-warming gases endanger human health, a move that would rewrite how the federal government responds to climate change. The Trump administration is set to revoke the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the scientific and legal determination that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. Rather than updating that judgment with new evidence, the agency is preparing to pull the legal rug out from under its climate authority altogether.
The decision turns a technical rulemaking into a stark political statement about whether the federal government accepts that burning fossil fuels harms people. It also raises a more practical question: what happens when the country’s main environmental regulator tries to pretend its own diagnosis of a public health risk never existed, even as climate-driven disasters have cost the United States at least $47636 million in recent years according to federal damage estimates cited in legal and policy analyses.
What the Endangerment Finding actually does
The Endangerment Finding was issued in 2009, after years of scientific review and legal pressure, and it declared that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. In plain terms, the agency concluded that pollution from carbon dioxide and related gases was not just an abstract climate concern but a direct risk to people’s lives, livelihoods and communities. That conclusion has since framed how federal officials think about everything from tailpipe emissions to power plant pollution.
Legally, the finding is more than a statement of concern. It is the prerequisite for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, the statute that gives the EPA its core authority over air pollution. A detailed legal review explains that the Endangerment Finding is the EPA’s scientific and legal conclusion that the Clean Air Act requires regulation of greenhouse gases, and it stems from the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which held that climate pollution fits within the law’s broad definition of air pollutants. Without that finding, the agency’s climate rules lose their anchor, and any attempt to regulate heat-trapping gases becomes far easier to challenge in court.
How the Trump EPA moved to erase it
The current push did not appear overnight. On July 29, 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed new rulemaking to dismantle the Endangerment Finding, signaling that it wanted to reverse the conclusion that emissions from vehicles, power plants and industrial operations endanger public health and the environment. That same day, EPA announced a proposal to rescind the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding in an official Rule Summary, laying out a path to reconsider and ultimately withdraw the earlier determination.
Earlier this year, in early January 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a draft final rule to the Trump administration to repeal the Endangerment Finding, moving the plan from theory to imminent action. By February, reporting indicated that EPA will revoke the Endangerment Finding that underpins all climate regulation this week, confirming that the agency intends to eliminate the very basis for its greenhouse gas rules. The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding the 2009 government declaration known as the Endangerment Finding, and separate analysis notes that the Trump Administration is preparing to finalize its repeal of that finding. On Thursday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will join President Donald Trump to announce the repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding, turning a dense regulatory step into a high-profile political event.
The legal stakes: undoing a Supreme Court-driven mandate
From a legal perspective, this is not just one rule among many. The Endangerment Finding stems from the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, which forced the agency to decide whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and, if so, to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. The EPA’s own description of the Endangerment Finding emphasizes that it is the agency’s scientific and legal conclusion that the Clean Air Act requires regulation of greenhouse gases, not a discretionary policy preference that can be flipped on and off like a light switch.
That is why courts have previously upheld the Endangerment Finding, including the District of Columbia Circuit, treating it as a reasoned judgment grounded in extensive evidence rather than a political whim. Legal advocates stress that the Endangerment Finding is the prerequisite for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, which means that revoking it would remove the statutory trigger that has supported climate rules for vehicles, power plants and industrial sources in the United States and around the world. EPA has regulated greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act since 2009, and the Trump administration’s plan is to undo the landmark finding that climate pollution threatens public health and welfare, effectively attempting to sidestep the Supreme Court’s earlier instruction by declaring that the danger no longer exists.
From climate science to “cherry-picked” data
At the heart of this fight is a clash over what counts as valid evidence. That Obama-era policy determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, drawing on decades of climate science that linked rising temperatures to heat stress, stronger storms and other harms. The Endangerment Finding declares that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and it has served as the factual spine for federal climate policy ever since.
To justify reversing that conclusion, the current EPA has leaned on a narrower reading of data that critics say ignores the weight of research. The American Geophysical Union stated the EPA’s justification presented “inaccurate and cherry-picked” information, warning that the agency was misusing science to reach a pre-set outcome. A group of 85 experts joined that criticism according to the same account, underscoring how far the agency’s new stance sits from mainstream climate research. When an environmental regulator is accused by leading scientists of cherry-picking evidence, the analogy that comes to mind is a doctor who discards most of a patient’s test results to claim there is no illness.
What repealing the finding could change
Because the Endangerment Finding underpins all climate regulation, revoking it would ripple through nearly every federal rule that targets greenhouse gases. The Endangerment Finding is the prerequisite for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, so its removal would invite legal challenges to standards for vehicles, power plants and industrial facilities that were built on that authority. According to one Rule Summary from EPA, the agency’s own proposal to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding framed the move as a reconsideration of whether greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, even though the practical effect is to strip away the legal basis for existing and future rules.
The Trump administration’s plan is to undo the landmark finding that climate pollution threatens public health and welfare, and critics warn that this would weaken protections against emissions that drive stronger storms, heat waves and other hazards. Sierra Club Texas has described the Endangerment Finding background as central to federal climate protections, and by eliminating the Endangerment Finding the Trump Administration is preparing to finalize its rollback of major health and climate safeguards that cover greenhouse gas pollution. In practice, that could mean slower progress on cleaning up vehicles and power plants, more uncertainty for industries that have already invested in cleaner technology and a patchwork of state rules as places like California and New York push ahead on their own.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
