Senate Republicans Move to Strip California's EPA Emissions Waivers, Widening Fight Over Who Sets National Car Standards

Senate Republicans are trying to kill off a set of EPA waivers that gave California the power to write its own emissions rules, arguing the state has turned a narrow legal exception into national policy nobody else voted for.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming is leading the push, joined by Sens. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, Jon Husted of Ohio and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, according to Fox News Digital. Their resolutions use the Congressional Review Act to void EPA waivers covering gas-powered lawn equipment, passenger vehicle emissions, the Advanced Clean Cars program, and the original 2009 waiver that let California regulate greenhouse gases from automobiles.

"California's climate zealots have run roughshod over the rest of the country for too long," Lummis told Fox News Digital. "Under Governor Newsom, Sacramento has decided it can dictate what Wyoming families drive and what equipment our small businesses use. That ends today."

The Clean Air Act has let California seek stricter-than-federal emissions waivers since the 1960s, a carve-out originally meant to deal with severe Los Angeles smog. Because automakers rarely build separate product lines for one state, California's standards have functionally become the national standard for decades. Republicans argue that California's roughly 40 million residents and outsized market let it set rules for all 50 states without those other states getting a vote.

This isn't the first swing at this target. Last year, Congress already voted to rescind three Biden-era waivers covering trucks, cars and buses, according to Fox News. Thursday's package goes further, going after the earlier decisions Republicans say built the legal foundation for those waivers in the first place. Because the CRA bars agencies from reissuing rules that are "substantially the same," killing these waivers would make it harder for a future Democratic administration to simply reinstate them.

Those waivers weren't handed out casually. As Breitbart reported, the outgoing Biden EPA approved several of them in the final days before Trump's second inauguration, specifically to lock in California's rules before Trump could reverse them. The American Trucking Associations blasted the truck waiver as "short-lived" at the time and predicted the incoming EPA under Lee Zeldin would reverse it. They were right.

This vehicle-emissions battle is one piece of a much bigger fight between the Trump administration and California that touches energy, coastlines and forests.

On clean energy funding, court documents in an ongoing lawsuit reveal something more serious than a policy disagreement. The Department of Energy has stipulated, in filings reported by the Los Angeles Times, that $7.6 billion in clean energy grants terminated last October were selected "based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state" — whether it voted for Trump or not. The DOE also conceded the cuts weren't based on "any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor," directly contradicting the administration's public statement that the grants were killed because they "did not adequately advance the nation's energy needs."

California lost more projects than any other state, 79 of roughly 300 nationwide, including funding for a hydrogen hub, battery plants and grid upgrades. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law and co-counsel in one of the lawsuits challenging the cuts, said it's illegal to cut off funding based on how a state voted. That's a serious allegation from a named legal expert, backed by the administration's own court filing, though it remains contested litigation and no court has yet ruled on the merits.

On the coast, the administration is reviewing California's authority under the Coastal Zone Management Act, a law that lets the state object to federal projects like offshore drilling that conflict with state policy. The Los Angeles Times, citing unnamed experts, frames the review as a "thinly veiled attempt" to open the coast to more drilling, rocket launches and floating nuclear reactors. That's a characterization from sources critical of the administration, not a confirmed outcome — the review is ongoing and no decertification has occurred.

In forests, the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Secretary Brooke Rollins is moving to rescind the roadless rule on more than 4 million acres of California's national forest land, according to LAist and CalMatters reporting. Rollins argues the rule blocks fuel treatments needed to reduce wildfire risk. California's Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot counters that roadless areas have already seen 240,000 acres of vegetation treatment without new roads, and that Forest Service research itself shows nearly two-thirds of human-caused fires in Southern California forests start along existing roadsides — an inconvenient detail for the argument that more roads mean fewer fires.

Meanwhile California keeps legislating around federal roadblocks. The Guardian reports the state just became the first in the nation to mandate energy-efficient replacement tires, a rule that doesn't need federal approval and is projected by the California Energy Commission to save drivers nearly $1 billion a year starting in 2029. Michelin backs it; Goodyear and Yokohama oppose it.

None of these fights are settled. The Senate resolutions need floor votes and, eventually, survival against a filibuster or presidential signature depending on which chamber controls what. The DOE lawsuit over clean energy grants remains in litigation. The coastal review has no set decertification date. California and Washington are fighting this battle on at least five fronts at once, and neither side is backing down.