Trucking company sues to end California control over federal emissions standards

San Francisco, CA; March 7, 2025: Today, a family-owned trucking company has filed a lawsuit against the EPA, seeking to block new emissions rules that the agency approved from California.

“Our Revolution was fought to throw off a faraway government—in which we had no representation—but the federal government cheated off King George’s homework when it created the Clean Air Act,” said Luke Wake, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. “Forcing businesses to submit to rules written by California bureaucrats 3,000 miles away is blatantly unconstitutional and allows the federal government to escape accountability for the fallout. We are asking the court to strike down this regulatory scheme because California shouldn’t be enabled to create federally enforceable standards.”

The Clean Air Act gives California the power to create its own set of federally enforceable emissions standards in place of those created by the EPA. California technically has to apply for a waiver, but the EPA must grant the waiver, as long as California has reasonably determined its standards are more stringent than baseline EPA regulations. The only other condition is that California must point to extraordinary conditions to justify its heightened standards; California claims that the problem of climate change justifies its vehicle emission regulations. And courts have severely curtailed the EPA’s ability to enforce these requirements, making them effectively a rubber stamp.

Once the EPA grants California its waiver for new emissions standards, those California regulations become part of the Clean Air Act’s regulatory scheme. The Act forces states to choose between federal emissions standards and California’s regulations. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted the California standards, forcing nearly 40% of the country to comply with regulations that neither the federal government nor their own state legislatures had any say in creating.

H.R. Ewell, a trucking company that has been owned by the Ewell family for two generations, knows the burden of this regulatory structure all too well. Pennsylvania promulgated a regulation in 2002 that automatically adopts each new California emissions standard for heavy-diesel engines. This puts H.R. Ewell at the mercy of California’s regulators in perpetuity. (A different group of truckers is challenging Pennsylvania’s automatic adoption of California’s rules in a separate case.)

Only Congress can make federal law. Handing state governments, or anyone else, the power to create federally enforceable regulatory standards violates the nondelegation doctrine. Allowing California to set federal standards puts businesses under the thumb of elected officials of a state where they do not live and might not even do business.

The case is HR Ewell v. EPA, filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.