Trump EPA Moves To Destroy Clean Port Plans

On July 22, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency took action aimed at repealing the current versions of California’s At Berth and Commercial Harbor Craft regulations, and preventing any similar regulations in the future. If successful, the loss would be devastating. The At Berth rule will save 230 lives, with total health benefits of $2.31 billion, while the Harbor Craft rule will save 530 lives with total health benefits of $5.25 billion. So repealing both rules will cost 760 lives and $7.56 billion.

The regulations — like dozens of others — are allowed to be stricter than national standards by a waiver provision in the Clean Air Act dating back to 1970. But Trump’s EPA has falsely declared the waivers to be rules, and submitted them to Congress, seeking to have them revoked via a process defined by the Congressional Review Act — which had only been used once before Trump first took office

“This sham attempt to nullify waivers is nothing more than a political attack on California’s ability to reduce the toxic diesel pollution spewing from ships, ferries, and tugboats,” said Katherine García, Sierra Club’s clean transportation director. “Congress should reject this blatant overreach.”

“This attempt with the waivers is simply another example of the current administration’s trend to go backwards, causing greater injury to the public in order to enhance the short term goals and gains of the shipping industry,” said Janet Gunter, from San Pedro Peninsula Homeowners United. “It is an illustration of the political will to ignore human destruction of self in order to award greater immediate profit to the privileged.”

“The federal government’s attack on California’s At Berth and Commercial Harbor Craft waivers is a misuse of the Congressional Review Act,” said Davina Hurt, Pacific Environment’s climate policy director. “For more than 50 years, Clean Air Act waiver programs have been respected by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Until now, no administration had attempted to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn these waivers,” she said.

“The CRA was written to let Congress reject new federal agency rules, not permissions granted to a single state decades ago,” Hurt told Random Lengths. “It was never used against a clean air act waiver before 2025 and this is now the third wave of attempts to do just that.”

The first batch of three waivers were revoked on June 12, 2025, and California sued to overturn them the same day, arguing that the process was both illegal and unconstitutional on multiple grounds. The CRA gives Congress 60 legislative days to reject a rule once it’s been finalized. But under Trump two agencies returned to earlier decisions not considered rules, reclassified them as rules and sent them to Congress. The General Accounting Office agreed that resource management plans developed by the Bureau of Land Management qualified as rules, but also ruled that California’s CAA waivers were not, which should have been end of story. Despite that ruling — which was echoed by  Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — Congress voted to revoke the waivers. The case challenging that action is still in litigation.

The second batch of waivers, dealing with cars and off-road engines, was introduced June 12, 2026 and quickly met with a motion to block it 10 days later. It argued that “EPA’s reclassifications [of waivers as rules] are arbitrary and capricious” and therefore illegal, and called for them to be revoked and not repeated in the future. The same argument will doubtlessly be made in defense of the port regulations as well.

The CRA lay virtually dormant for 20 years after its passage in 1996: it was used successfully only once, in 2001. But then under Trump, it sprang to life. It was used successfully 16 times in Trump’s first term, and 22 times in his second term so far.

“EPA has expanded this tactic in an unprecedented way that’s really threatening investments already made by ports and shippers and utilities, and equipment manufacturers,” Hurt said.

“Congress was purposeful. They wrote California’s compelling and extraordinary conditions directly into the statute,” she said. “So, the at birth and harborcraft rules were built over years of public process, with ports, shipping lines, utilities. And this is just throwing a wrench and causing issues unnecessarily and it questions common sense.”

While California as a whole, and the LA/Long Beach ports in particular are the prime targets of this latest action, “This fight is not California’s alone,” Hurt said. “There been 11 other states that sued over the vehicle waiver repeal, and a broader coalition of ports and health advocates, industry and environmental groups, they’ve united against this last move,” she said. “We have a coalition of clean shipping organizations who want to maintain these regulations because of the good work they’ve been doing and the improvements that they’ve seen.”

While EPA portrayed waiver repeal as a cost-free benefit, characterizing the waivers as increasing shipping costs and imposing burdensome and unrealistic requirements — arguments made by industry and rejected in California’s regulation-making process. In contrast, Hurt characterized the attempted waiver repeal as “playing politics with our health, undermining the regulatory certainty businesses rely on, and jeopardizing billions of dollars in public and private investments made under these life-saving rules.”

“This isn’t an affordability fix, it’s a cost transfer,” she explained. “Someone still pays for dirty air at the port and right now the polluters are making those investments to clean the air. If you kill this rule, it’s the families living in the ports who pay instead.”

And while revoking the waivers is purportedly part of Trump’s deregulatory agenda, on the ground, “folks are thinking that that’s not deregulation, that’s a bait-and-switch on every business that’s played by the rules,” Hurt said.

“These are American businesses. These are small businesses, as well as a large business, that have invested these dollars to do what’s right by the community and also clean up the emissions all around the world,” she explained. “This is causing uncertainty when we need the exact opposite,” exactly like what happened with Trump’s tariffs, which were eventually found to be illegal and unconstitutional — the same fate that may well meet the revocation of the waivers.

And rather than helping American business, Hurt said, “This is really an attempt to keep American ports wielded to yesterday’s diesel engines, while the rest of the world builds tomorrow’s ships and ports.”

The regulations’ benefits are clear, as noted above, but the potential disruption of revoking them is difficult to gauge. So much so that the ports seem to have a hard time grasping the current situation, much less what lies ahead.

“The Port of Los Angeles remains committed to improving air quality while maintaining our role as the nation’s premier gateway for seaborne containerized cargo,” POLA said in a statement. “Regardless of what happens, the fact remains that more ships plug in here at our port than anywhere else. While the Port will not speculate on potential congressional action, we are committed to achieving further improvements in both the short and long term.”

The Port of Long Beach CEO Dr. Noel Hacegaba struck a slightly grittier tone, tied to specific goals:

“Today, ships docked at all of California’s major ports use shore power, which was originally pioneered for cargo vessels at the Port of Long Beach,” he said. “We have a transformative vision to double our cargo volume to 20 million container units annually by 2050. As we learn more about the EPA’s announcement, the Port of Long Beach will continue working with our federal and state partners, industry, labor and other stakeholders to become the first zero-emissions seaport in North America.”

“Shore power is needed to help us achieve that goal,” he added. “Yet we’re not betting the port’s energy future on any single tool or initiative. Our strategy involves developing a diverse portfolio of carbon-free energy sources, including methanol, hydrogen, solar, wind and our recently announced project with the U.S. Maritime Administration to advance small modular reactor technology.”

These have been developed with a combination of carrots and sticks, however. On the carrot side, Hacegaba said, “Over the past two decades, we’ve grown cargo volumes to record levels while significantly reducing emissions thanks in part to more than $180 million we have invested to equip our terminals with shore power.” But it’s unclear what happens if Trump succeeds in taking away the sticks.

“Regardless of how the federal regulatory process evolves, we remain committed to practical solutions that protect jobs, strengthen the supply chain, improve air quality and keep the port moving towards our long-term goals. That’s how we will continue building the port of the future.”

That may sound encouraging, but Gunter reminds us of just how recent this commitment it, and how problematic.

“The problem of port air emissions was only acknowledged after the winning of the NRDC & San Pedro community’s lawsuit against the China Shipping expansion in 2003,” Gunter said. “The toxic emissions had existed long prior without any recognition of their disproportionate impacts on local public health.”

Indeed California’s regulation of auto pollution pre-dated the Clean Air Act, and is perhaps the main reason for the state’s CAA waivers, while the original Commercial Harbor Craft Regulation dates from 2008, the same year as the first Ocean-Going Vessel Fuel Regulation, while the At Berth Regulation only dates from 2020, and went into effect in 2023.

“Over the past 23 years, the slow incremental steps by CARB toward reduction of these deadly emissions have begun to have an effect,” Gunter continued. “However, the port’s continual growth has impeded those improvements by making more stringent regulations and stronger oversight by CARB and the AQMD necessary to improve the situation.”

Revoking the waivers could very well bring all of that to a screeching halt.