Policy experts say the reversals also underscore the fact that crucial positions within the E.P.A. and the Interior Department remain unfilled, and that a lack of trust exists between political appointees and career staff members.

“The career people at E.P.A. and D.O.J. are top-notch lawyers,” said Richard J. Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University. “But you have political people come in, and they don’t trust them at all and try to do it without them.”

Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, who has been perhaps the most aggressive of the state officials suing to challenge Trump administration rollbacks, said he hopes the White House is getting the message.

“No man, no woman is above the law,” Mr. Becerra said in an interview, shortly after the California magistrate judge ruled that the Interior Department had illegally postponed the enforcement of the methane flaring rule. “You have to follow the rule of law. It makes no difference if you are in the White House or not.”

Each of the rules at the center of these legal challenges has major public implications.

The Department of Interior methane rule reinstated by a federal court on Wednesday will annually eliminate the equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions from about 950,000 vehicles, according to an Obama administration estimate, while also generating millions of dollars in extra federal revenues because oil and gas companies right now do not pay royalties on methane they flare off in giant torches that light the sky.

But the Interior Department, under new leadership, argued that these environmental benefits were not worth the costs.

“Small independent oil and gas producers in states like North Dakota, Colorado and New Mexico, which account for a substantial portion of our nation’s energy wealth, could be hit the hardest,” Katharine MacGregor, a senior Interior Department official, said in a statement this spring.