Washington, D.C. - Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), submitted an amicus curiae brief to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in support of a lawsuit against the Trump Administration, which mass-exempted facilities from a Clean Air Act rule that protects the public from hazardous air pollutants.

The rule at issue, the Hazardous Organic NESHAP (HON) Rule, provides EPA a robust framework for limiting hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) known to cause cancer, reproductive harms, and birth defects. Congress authorized the President to exempt a source from complying with those limits for up to two years in emergency situations, if "the technology required to implement the standard is not available and an exemption is in the national security interests of the nation."

On July 17, 2025, President Trump issued a single proclamation mass-exempting 50 disparate facilities from the HON Rule. In its four cursory paragraphs, the President's proclamation provided zero support for either of the determinations the statute requires before an exemption may be granted. The proclamation ignores that several of the technologies in the HON Rule are already used by existing facilities and provides no explanation for its purported national security concerns.

"The HON Proclamation is a cartoon version of presidential authority, in which none of the work has been done to connect cause to effect, rule to consequence, or regulation to injury, let alone distinguish among varied products, processes, or facilities. The Proclamation replaces the honest work of analysis with incantation of feigned, conclusory assertions," wrote the Senator.

Since the first proclamation, Trump has issued six additional proclamations, exempting over 180 facilities. "This cookie-cutter approach reduces the Section 7412(i)(4) exemption process to farce. It is plainly at odds with the way Congress designed the statute to work and its goal of protecting Americans from the most dangerous air pollutants. The Court is not powerless to prevent such absurdity."

The Senator concludes that President Trump "acted in flagrant disregard of the statute and without proper authority. This Court should say so. Otherwise, nothing stands in the way of the President disregarding Congress and aggrandizing power to himself by the mere recitation of the statutory standard, with none of the work of actual compliance."

Full text of the brief is available here.