This story originally appeared on Slate and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It is a popular fiction that despite its many foibles, the Trump administration has been successful in dismantling environmental regulations. Given the sheer number of attacks levied on energy and environmental regulations involving the coal, oil, gas, and automotive industries, casual observers might reasonably conclude that the administration is deploying a successful deregulatory strategy.

It is not. The administration has made multiple efforts to put Obama-era regulatory requirements on ice, but these efforts have largely failed. With its delay tactics in tatters, the administration is now taking a different approach—instead of just stopping old regulations, it’s surfacing new replacement rules that would let industry walk away from environmental and public-health and safety obligations that have solid evidentiary support and broad appeal. But having squandered half of its four-year term, the White House faces an uphill climb in developing and finalizing many of its major environmental rollback initiatives, and getting them past now-skeptical courts, before the clock runs out.

The efforts to roll back the oil and gas industry’s obligations to reduce methane emissions specifically illustrate this reality. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department tried, first, to quickly sideline methane regulations. The gambit failed. Progressive state attorneys general and environmental groups pounced, and won, exposing an impulsive administration that had failed to do its legal homework.

The Trump administration targeted two specific methane rules that the Obama administration had finalized before it left office: the EPA’s New Source Performance Standard, or NSPS, and the Interior Department’s methane-waste reduction rule. The Obama administration finalized the EPA methane rule in June 2016. It focuses primarily on detecting and repairing methane leaks for new oil and gas drilling activities. In May 2017, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced a 90-day delay for a key compliance deadline for the NSPS. Three weeks later, the EPA proposed a bare-bones “suspension” rule that sought to delay implementation of the existing rule for two years.

State attorneys general and environmental groups immediately petitioned for court review, arguing that the EPA had no authority to nullify key compliance requirements by administrative fiat. The District of Columbia Circuit Court agreed. It moved swiftly to strike down the EPA’s compliance delay, ruling that “an agency issuing a legislative rule is itself bound by the rule until that rule is amended and revoked” through a formal, substantive “notice and comment” process. This ruling sent the EPA back to the drawing board for 14 months.

A similar pattern applies to the Interior Department’s restrictions on methane emissions for oil and gas operations conducted on public lands. The department promulgated the methane “waste prevention rule” in November 2016 in response to evidence gathered by the Government Accountability Office and other watchdog groups that some oil and gas drillers were wasting valuable, publicly owned assets by venting and flaring large quantities of unwanted methane in violation of the Mineral Leasing Act.

Like its efforts to sideline the EPA’s methane restrictions, the Trump administration tried to nullify the Interior Department’s methane-waste reduction rule. Initial efforts included a failed attempt to overturn the rule under the Congressional Review Act and an unsuccessful petition in the normally friendly U.S. District Court of Wyoming to enjoin operation of the rule. In June 2017, Interior Secretary Zinke announced that the department was delaying industry-compliance requirements under the rule. This effort also failed. A federal court in California agreed with California’s and New Mexico’s attorneys general, Xavier Becerra and Hector Balderas, that the Interior Department must complete a full rule-making process under the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, before it can set aside the Obama rule. The court also noted that the Interior Department could not justify its change in direction by myopically focusing on the rule’s compliance costs to industry. It also must consider “the benefits of the rule, such as decreased resource waste, air pollution, and enhanced public revenues.”