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IU McKinney Professor of Practice Janet McCabe, director of the Environmental Resilience Institute, is co-author of a new article that details how the Trump Administration is weakening one of the long-established cornerstones of the Clean Air Act to appease industry at the expense of public health.

The article, published by Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program (EELP), examines subtle actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce the effectiveness of a permitting program called New Source Review (NSR), which is designed to ensure that new or expanding facilities use updated air pollution control technologies and meet all federal requirements.

Professor McCabe teamed up with Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard Law School’s EELP, and William Niebling, a senior associate at the law firm Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman, to write the legal analysis.

Historically, NSR has contributed to overall reductions in air pollution even as facilities expand. Recent changes and proposed changes, however, offer companies early off-ramps from pollution reduction obligations. These changes, among other polluter-friendly actions taken by the EPA, have coincided with a recent rise in air pollution in the US after years of improvement.

“Most of these actions have been issued with little fanfare, often without analysis of their potential effects and without acknowledging or revealing clearly to the public that many of the actions have a cumulative or compounding effect on each other and thus on the effectiveness of NSR,” the authors write.