FAS: Redesign Climate Rules, Don't Restore Them
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- Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman are co-leading the new Center for Regulatory Ingenuity at the Federation of American Scientists, arguing the opposite of Trump's rollbacks isn't restoring the old system but rebuilding government capacity to actually deliver a clean energy transition.
- Safford, a scientist and engineer who worked on climate policy in the Obama (2014–2016) and Biden White Houses, said both administrations had ambition and expertise but lacked tools that were 'deeply effective and durable and matched to the pace of the challenge.'
- Schulman, a 10-year NSC and DoD career official who later served as Biden's OMB Associate Director for Personnel and Performance Management, drew parallels from national security, where strategy announcements were 'at best headline-deep' and assumed personnel and funding decisions would 'figure themselves out' — they didn't.
- The guests contend the endangerment finding, the Inflation Reduction Act, and California's vehicle standards — all under Trump assault — were built on 1970s-era pollution-control tools never designed to swap out an entire fossil fuel economy.
- Biden-era regulatory standards like fuel-economy rules for EVs hit what Safford called a 'divide-by-zero problem' — infinite miles per gallon when there are no gallons — illustrating how the old frameworks strain when applied to clean energy.
- The initiative was conceived during the late Biden administration as a retrospective on why climate regulations and IRA spending moved slower than intended, and gained urgency once the second Trump term made rollback a certainty.
Why it matters: The framing matters because it recasts the Trump rollback from pure loss into a potential forcing function: if the FAS team is right that the pre-Trump toolkit was already mismatched to the energy transition, then defending the status quo would mean rebuilding a regulatory engine that was stalling under its own design limitations — and the 2025–2026 window becomes the moment to build something more durable, not to simply reverse course.
