Trump Orders Sunset Dates on Energy Regulations

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Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--April has been a particularly busy month for the White House. Tariffs were announced April 2, modified several times, and then suspended (except for China) April 9, which continue to reverberate through global stock and bond markets. President Donald Trump also issued several far-reaching executive actions on energy on April 8 and 9. One order directed agency heads to repeal "unlawful regulations." A second sought to reverse state actions that impede his "energy dominance" agenda. A third sought to revive coal mining and the use of coal in electric generation. For more on the coal executive order, see April 9, 2025, article - Trump Executive Order Seeks to Reverse Decline of Coal.

But an executive order issued April 9, on "zero-based regulatory budgeting," has drawn particular attention from a wide range of interested parties, including energy and environmental groups, law firms and free-market advocates. Seeking to "unleash American energy," that order instructed 10 federal agencies to "incorporate a sunset provision into their regulations governing energy production to the extent permitted by law, thus compelling those agencies to reexamine their regulations periodically to ensure that those rules serve the public good."

By September 30 of this year, the executive order instructed affected energy agencies to insert a one-year expiration date into any existing rule affecting energy production. New orders are to be given a five-year sunset date. The sunsetting process will be overseen by members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at each affected agency and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a White House office.

The executive order asserted that U.S. energy production has long been caught in a "regime of governance-by-regulator (that) has imposed particularly severe costs on energy production, where innovation is critical," and that the "energy landscape (is) perpetually trapped in the 1970s."

The U.S. produced about 13.2 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's approximately 53% more than average daily production from 1973-1979, when domestic production averaged roughly 8.6 million bpd, the agency said. The EIA began tracking U.S. oil production in 1974. The surge in production stemming from the shale revolution over the prior decade shows U.S. is anything but "trapped in the 1970s."

At this early stage, lawyers appear to be the only group likely to attain prosperity from this April 9 executive order.

Most of the order is taken up with instructing specific agencies to consider particular regulations enacted pursuant to certain statutes and amendments to those statutes. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) were directed to provide the White House OMB lists of statutes conveying regulatory authority that shall be subject to this order. Those lists may be lengthy.

The April 9 order said it will be enacted in ways that are "to the extent permitted by law" and "consistent with applicable law." Sunset dates for future regulations will be set "to the maximum extent consistent with law." The public will have an opportunity "to comment on the costs and benefits of each regulation." Further, the OMB director is given the authority to exempt a new regulation or amendment from the requirements of this paragraph "if he determines that the new regulation or amendment has a net deregulatory effect."

Finally, the order may have exempted a wide range of federal regulations when it said it "shall not apply to regulatory permitting regimes authorized by statute." That appears to apply to permitting decisions made under major energy and environmental laws enacted by Congress, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act--many of which the administration is attempting to modify in other initiatives in ways that are friendly to industry.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told The New York Times, "That's a huge loophole that could make the rest of the order completely ineffectual. Most environmental laws would seem to fall under that category" of federal statutes.

The reaction to the April 9 order by law firms was swift, and generally just a tad short of apoplectic.

The Quad Report newsletter gathered commentary from a number of energy lawyers and advocacy groups.

Clint Vince, a veteran energy lawyer and head of the energy practice at the law firm Dentons, said the order was "unlawful and destructive."

For decades, businesses have used the concept of "zero-based budgeting" to transform their budgeting process: When building next year's budget, rather than use the current budget as a base from which it would add or subtract, zero-based budgeting starts with a blank sheet of paper, with no assumptions or allocations from the prior year.

Those frustrated by the lengthy and incremental federal agency rulemaking process may be drawn to its extreme opposite: zero-based regulatory budgeting. Free-market and small-government enthusiasts have advocated for some form of zero-based regulatory budgeting for some time.

In an op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal published after Trump's order, James Broughel, a senior fellow with the libertarian think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), applauded the president's executive action on energy. In an article titled, "Zero Is the Magic Number for Cutting Red Tape," he wrote, "Trump's executive order on energy rules shows the path for ending obsolete and outdated regulations."

However, one thing that particularly troubles some lawyers is the way the sunset provision of the executive order sidesteps the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a 1946 law that laid out the process federal agencies must follow when they write regulations. The first Trump administration lost many of its legal challenges because it did not follow the requirements of the APA. The April executive orders contain no reference to the APA.

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