Establishing automotive fuel economy standards (setting the average distance in miles a car travels on one gallon of gasoline) for American passenger vehicles has essentially been the job of two distinct federal agencies since 1975: the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which sets the standards, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which measures them. The two agencies’ distinct and separate roles require that they collaborate. Put simply, to establish fuel economy standards, the NHTSA—a relatively small organization as federal agencies go—needs the much larger and better-funded EPA’s data and testing.

To understand why these standards (which we now take for granted) are subject to federal regulation at all, it helps to have grown up during the 1970s, specifically 1973. That year Americans were given a harsh lesson: The cheap gas and oil they had been accustomed to for decades would not magically last forever. As a result of a joint embargo on petroleum sales to the U.S. by several Arab states (in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War) the spigot of cheap gas that the American public enjoyed was suddenly shut off. Almost immediately, long lines began to form at the gas pumps, with scenes of cars backed down the streets, their motors chugging away, and irate drivers waiting impatiently to get gas. I personally remember “gas rationing” coupons and only being allowed to gas up the car on alternate weekends. The price of gas nearly doubled that year—and it never really went back down. This was known as the “Arab Oil Embargo” at the time, but later became known as the “Energy Crisis.”

In 1975, Congress instituted “Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency” (CAFE) standards, applicable to all cars sold to be driven on American roads. Those standards established the average fuel economy a manufacturer’s fleet was required to meet. Additional fuel economy standards were introduced by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, with the intent of increasing the fuel economy of American passenger cars and eventually, light trucks. In 2007, fuel economy standards were raised even higher, driven in part by a near-doubling of the number of miles being driven by Americans, and an exploding U.S. market (and higher oil and gas consumption) for SUVs, which has continued to this day.

Something else occurred in 2007. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide could be considered by the EPA as a pollutant, since the emission of CO 2 was the primary cause of man-made climate change. Under George W. Bush, the EPA had vigorously opposed this interpretation. Why? Because under the Clean Air Act, the EPA was statutorily required to regulate (and thereby control) the pollutants emitted from automobiles—and acknowledging the reality of man-made climate change as a result of CO 2 emissions was something the industry-friendly Bush folks decidedly did not want to do. Emissions from passenger vehicles and light trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all carbon pollution (greenhouse gas emissions) in the United States. Thus, regulating CO 2 begins with the internal combustion engine.

After the Bush administration was relegated to the dustbin of history, President Barack Obama, with a view toward reducing the spew of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, immediately ordered the NHTSA and EPA to cooperate in setting standards through 2025. California, which enjoys a special “waiver” status under the Clean Air Act , allowing that state to enforce stricter fuel economy standards, would work with these two agencies as well. The result was a landmark agreement between the federal government and the auto industry, establishing in 2009 what the Union of Concerned Scientists described as the “first meaningful fuel efficiency improvements in over 30 years and the first-ever global warming pollution standards for light-duty vehicles.”

What resulted was one of the most effective climate protections in American history. The tailpipe rules, published by the three entities in 2012, required carbon pollution from new cars and light trucks to decrease every year until 2025. In exchange for several concessions, automakers even agreed to accept the rules without a lawsuit. This was virtually unheard of—seemingly every company fights new EPA regulations in court—but it was crucial for the White House. With the tailpipe rules on firm legal footing, the EPA could move to regulate carbon pollution in other parts of the economy.

These standards were designed to be implemented in two phases, from 2012-2016 and 2017-2025. As a result of Phase I of this joint, cooperative effort, fuel economy soared for American passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks, improving from about 31 to 39 miles per gallon, and saving American consumers an estimated $500 billion (with an additional $400 billion saved in health and macroeconomic costs), all while substantially decreasing the amount of carbon pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere. A “midterm review” by the Obama administration was also required to evaluate the new rules’ effectiveness. As 2016 rolled around it was anticipated that, despite grumblings by an American auto industry that wanted to sell more gas-guzzling SUVs, the rules would be maintained, with a goal of achieving 54.5 MPG fuel economy by 2025.

Then Trump won the election, and ushered in the most anti-environment administration in the nation’s history. From the very start it embraced a markedly more willful, open, and far more comprehensive debasement of all aspects of the environment, without exception. If even the smallest of industry interests could produce a spreadsheet that showed the tiniest profit from dumping battery acid into our streams, for example, the Trump administration signaled from the start that it would do its level best to obliterate any law or regulation preventing them from doing so.

The primary thread running through many of the administration’s actions is its fealty to the fossil fuel industry. If you peel back the rationale for the administration’s deregulatory agenda, the main beneficiaries are gas, oil, and mining industries, the same industries under the Koch Industries umbrella, and which contribute so heavily to the Republican Party. Since the Trump administration’s antipathy toward the environment is supported by its visceral rejection of anything that confirms the reality of man-made climate change, the opportunity to both thumb its nose at science and satisfy the demands of the fossil fuel industry by “rolling back” emissions standards for American vehicles was simply irresistible.

The EPA published its final fuel economy rules just before Trump took office, but the NHTSA did not respond by setting the new standards that automobiles would have to satisfy. When the EPA, still staffed with career employees and holdovers from the Obama administration, tried to contact NHTSA to discuss how the two agencies would enforce these rules with corresponding standards through the next decade, the only reply it received was stone cold silence. Trump’s people had already read NHTSA the riot act: They were going to “roll back” those rules.

In the Atlantic article, Meyer details how, through stonewalling and ignored phone calls and emails, the engineers at EPA were gradually made aware that they no longer had a partner in NHTSA. It was one of the first examples of what would become standard practice by the administration: staffing an agency with loyalists, pre-selected for one purpose—here, to satisfy the fossil fuel industry by gutting the Obama fuel economy standards that had been so annoyingly successful in protecting both the American people and the environment. Both NHTSA and EPA were placed under the leadership of Trump appointees, with NHTSA transforming itself into a deregulatory arm of the administration. Meyer’s article describes internal NHTSA documents indicating the emissions rule change was being feverishly worked on by NHTSA in mid-2017, but the EPA was deliberately kept out of the loop. Finally, in January 2018, NHTSA shared its “math” with EPA. The EPA’s engineering staff, as Meyer describes it, was stunned: Jeff Alson, a former EPA engineer who attended the meeting where NHTSA’s new “analysis” was first unveiled, recalled his fellow engineers were so flummoxed by the self-evident fakery of the data that no one could even bring themselves to comment. “We knew they had cooked the books so bad that there wasn’t any reason to talk about it.”

But repealing a federal rule, particularly one as comprehensive as the one governing emissions standards, is not a simple matter. As Meyer points out, under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), to change or update a federal rule, an agency is required to ”do its homework and publish an economic study arguing why the update is necessary.” Otherwise, if the change or update is challenged in court, a federal judge is free to find that the proposed change is “arbitrary and capricious” and thus invalid. Competent administrations try to avoid such an outcome. But the Trump administration was not competent.

In typical Republican fashion, the administration drafted a new set of rules rolling back the Obama emissions standards, labeling them with the misleading acronym “SAFE,” short for “Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule.” Like all acronyms for Republican-crafted legislation and regulation, SAFE is a pleasant-sounding misnomer for what these Trump-inspired standards actually are. Designed to cap fuel economy at 37 miles per gallon (or “freezing” requirements at 2021’s proposed levels), these “standards” were little more than a gift to please the American auto industry. Alson, who worked previously in EPA’s Transportation and Air Quality Office and had been involved in the creation of the original standards, states that “they don’t pass the laugh test” in terms of protecting either the American consumer or the environment. As far as emissions that cause global warming, the Trump rollbacks would pump billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to the EPA’s own 2018 analysis.

But—and this is critical—the standards stood out more than anything else for their abject sloppiness. As Meyer’s Atlantic article explains in detail, they were based on flawed mathematical calculations so egregious that they were impossible to ignore.

Trump’s official justification for SAFE is honeycombed with errors. The most dramatic is that NHTSA’s model mixed up supply and demand: The agency calculated that as cars got more expensive, millions more people would drive them, and the number of traffic accidents would increase, my reporting shows. This error—later dubbed the “phantom vehicles” problem—accounted for the majority of incorrect costs in the SAFE study that the Trump administration released in 2018. It is what made SAFE look safe. Once this and other major mistakes are fixed, all of SAFE’s safety benefits vanish, according to a recent peer-reviewed analysis in Science. If SAFE is adopted into law, American traffic deaths could actually increase, carbon pollution would soar, and global warming would speed up.

The Trump standards have been sharply criticized, both for their glaring analytical errors and for their damaging effect to the planet. Consumer Reports called them the “Un-SAFE” standards. Robert Weissman of Public Citizen called them a “disastrous wreck for consumers and the planet.” And Rob Sargent of Environment America, a federation of state-based environmental organizations, pointed out the disastrous impact these standards would have on the environment: "This latest move by the Trump administration means that our cars will continue to pump billions of metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate and sparking increasingly severe impacts of global warming."

But it may be the sheer incompetence of the people Trump appointed to the NHTSA that seals the fate of these new “standards.” As noted above, it is incumbent upon the executive branch to justify this rule change—in simple terms, to show that the net benefit outweighs the proposed cost. But, as Meyer explained in the 2018 article for The Atlantic that initially exposed these issues, thanks to the bungled analysis of the administration’s hires, there is no benefit to SAFE.

The mistakes range in scope from the comical to the bizarre, from the obviously accidental to the how-did-they-miss-that. In one case, federal employees have forgotten to divide a crucial figure by four. In another, officials have assumed that raising the cost of cars will lead more people to buy them, a violation of the principle of supply and demand. In a third case, the proposal asserts that freezing fuel-economy standards for new cars will lead the owners of old cars to drive their vehicles less.

Even more telling, as explained by Kenneth Gillingham, an economics professor at Yale interviewed by Meyer in 2018,, every single error made in the SAFE analysis tilts in favor of the administration. It is as if the analysis was deliberately and recklessly crafted to try to bamboozle an incurious federal judge. “There’s a systematic bias in all of these to inflate the crash fatalities [under the Obama-era rules],” said Gillingham. “We have not yet found any mistakes that work in the other direction.”

For an administration that loudly proclaims its disdain for the judiciary, this may simply be par for the course. And thanks to a Republican-controlled Senate, there is no shortage of industry-groomed federal judges who will reflexively sanction any form of "deregulation," no matter how sloppily it’s presented to them. However, even bad judges don’t like to be reversed on appeal, and the Trump standards are so flawed and error-filled that they would invite rejection on even the most casual scrutiny. As Meyer says, “Not since 1999—when NASA engineers accidentally confused metric and imperial units when building and navigating the Mars Climate Orbiter, leading to the spacecraft’s eventual destruction—have federal employees messed up a calculation so publicly, and at such expense and scale.”

Beyond the gross errors in the administration’s analysis, there is another big obstacle looming as these standards pass scrutiny: As Meyer explains, the auto manufacturers themselves, once so eager to curry the favor of this anti-regulatory administration, have soured on them.

By October 2018, Honda and General Motors had both backed off from their initial support of the administration’s rule change. The Wall Street Journal quotes a Ford spokesman as saying that the draconian nature of Trump’s proposed “rollback” would serve no purpose now that Ford, for example (and following the example of European companies like Audi), had committed substantial resources towards electrification of its fleet. "We have this heavy commitment to electrification," he said in an interview. "This is where the rest of the world is taking us anyway. If you start to add it all up, a giant rollback wouldn't have helped us at all.

Faced with the unmasking of its own incompetence, and the now less-than-lukewarm support of the very industry it was trying to please, the Trump administration in late 2019 began backpedaling on its rule change. In late January 2020, it announced that a “revised” set of rules would be forthcoming. This ”revision,” which has yet to be released, appears to acknowledge the EPA’s initial assessment that its own costs outweigh its benefits. According to a letter from Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware obtained and published by The Washington Post, the new rules would “lead to vehicles that are neither safer, nor more affordable or fuel efficient,” and would “harm U.S. national and economic security.” Further, they would “undermine efforts to combat global warming pollution, create regulatory and manufacturing uncertainty for the automobile industry and unnecessary litigation, and increase the amount of gasoline consumers would have to buy.” Carper’s correspondence also notes that the only approved requests for “flexibility” in complying with the standards appear to have been geared solely to satisfy the fossil fuel industry. Accordingly, he urges that the administration ”abandon these efforts entirely.”

As noted by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the revised and as-yet-unreleased rules “won’t save lives, will increase costs for drivers at the pump and may lead to even more carbon pollution than its original plan.” Additionally, the new rules would lead to more deaths overall on American highways, pour nearly 1 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, and actually harm the U.S. economy.

So, if this “rollback” doesn’t help and, in fact, harms Americans and is so practically unworkable that even the auto manufacturers don’t want it, it’s not hard to describe it as arbitrary and capricious. In reality it’s just another example of the Trump administration’s malevolent efforts to curry favor with the fossil fuel industry at the expense of the American people. As the coronavirus spread, this administration has already shown in the last week that it doesn’t care about Americans’ health or safety. Its only real interest is in satisfying the interests that pay up to keep it in power. This just happens to be one circumstance where its own incompetence probably made its corruption impossible.