California had a strategy to blunt Donald Trump’s edicts against electric vehicles Auto Market — and it got thrown into limbo. Trump 2.0 has left the Golden State’s influence in the nationwide Auto Market in tatters. When federal officials spent nearly 18 months in Trump’s first term to pull the plug on the state’s nation-leading electric vehicle sales mandate, they did it in fewer than five months this go-around — and California has yet to figure out a way to fend them off.
The result represents a dramatic turnaround from Trump’s first term, when California repeatedly slowed or derailed federal rollbacks — and often outmaneuvered a White House tangled in internal infighting. Now, he’s running roughshod over one of this heavily Democratic state’s signature policy priorities.
The squabbling, slipshod rule-bending, and the dearth of specific policy goals that characterized Trump’s first administration have been replaced by a government workforce forcefully restaffed with MAGA loyalists eager to explore the limits of executive power. With more-experienced agency staffers, the lockstep support of a Republican Congress behind them and before their plans, administrations had never had: an actual playbook in the form of Project 2025 — the conservative Heritage Foundation’s omnibus policy blueprint. Trump 2.0 has been a totally different animal.
“We didn’t have those layers and levers to pull the first time around, so all that together — the lessons learned, having done it before and knowing where to go looking for potential roadblocks — is why the second term has been far more effective,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who was EPA’s chief of staff during Trump’s first term and served as lead author on the agency chapter in Project 2025.
“Fast forward to this go around, the administration is putting a premium on not wasting time. They know how important time is, especially in the regulatory environment,” she added.
The Trump administration’s more muscular stance has played out across the policy landscape — from an aggressive, wide-ranging immigration effort to a clash with higher education that has left some universities backtracking on diversity efforts, clear support for transgender athletes, and more.
But nowhere has the administration’s newfound competence been more visible, perhaps, than its effort to gut California’s capacity to lead in dictating the terms of the electric-vehicle market — a goal that Trump vowed to fulfill with a Day 1 executive order. To many political and policy professionals here, that promise seemed like so much bluster at the time — until it wasn’t.
Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has become Democrats’ preeminent Trump antagonist and a front-runner for the 2028 presidential race, acknowledged during his visit to the United Nations’ climate conference in Brazil last month — a stop intended to burnish his environmentalist bona fides — tTrump Moves to Break California’s Auto Market Dominancehat Republicans have managed to stymie the state’s climate ambitions.
The Trump administration is working to do “everything to vandalize California’s leadership in this space, and they’ve been reasonably successful in nine and a half months to put a lot of sand in the gears,” Newsom told POLITICO while visiting São Paulo.
It wasn’t an accident. The four years between Trump’s terms provided a rare moment of pause that the MAGA movement took advantage of by building “a very focused plan and an obvious understanding of time,” Gunasekara said.
They were the kind of challenges that she and other veterans from the Trump 1.0 years ran up against repeatedly in a volatile first four years — inexperienced hires, internal resistance from career staff and an ignorance about how to move fast that hindered their attempts to roll back vast swaths of liberal policies, including on California’s EV efforts that are adopted by 11 other states.
“President Trump wasted no time in undoing Joe Biden’s Green New Scam, which played a significant role in causing the worst inflation crisis in modern American history, skyrocketing energy prices nationwide, and damaging economic growth,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, said.
‘A completely different playbook’
Trump’s campaign trail vow to swiftly throw off California’s EV sales mandate was met with skepticism from the start by state strivers and clean transportation advocates who saw the federal government flounder throughout his first term. That iteration of the Environmental Protection Agency, under then-Administrator Scott Pruitt, used a slow regulatory process to stall for almost two years before finalizing the repeal of California’s vehicle sales rules — allowing state air quality officials time to bargain with six car makers to collaborate on EV policy and lessen the blow.
This year, California officials dusted off their playbook. They poured money into the state attorney general’s office to prepare for a rash of lawsuits — but they also sat down with automakers to negotiate settlements.
But the EPA, now under the leadership of former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, and congressional Republicans doubled down on a once-rare legislative tool — the Congressional Review Act — to erase California’s EV mandate in June, catching top officials at Newsom’s office off guard.
“We thought it was going to look a lot more like Trump 1.0, and they’ve got an entirely different playbook,” said California’s top air quality official, Lauren Sanchez, a former climate adviser to Newsom, during POLITICO’s “The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit” in August. “They had four years to study what they did wrong in the first administration, and use new tactics.”
And the hits keep coming. California officials, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, are now trying to return to their weaker, decade-old vehicle emissions standards as a temporary alternative. The move has been met with resistance from Trump’s EPA, which has made clear it will do what it can to thwart the state’s efforts to regulate the Auto Market and greenhouse gases at every opportunity. State regulators put off a planned vote last month.
“We knew that to level-set EPA’s role in vehicle standards, we were going to have to deal with California’s recalcitrance one way or the other,” Gunasekara, who continues to make frequent appearances in conservative media discussing energy policy, said.
Former Trump and Biden administration officials, Auto Market industry groups, conservative attorneys and E.V. advocates say that the Congressional Review Act gambit shows how four years of intense preparation combined with President Donald J. Trump’s forceful push to rally rank-and-file Republican lawmakers swung the anvil — across some serious bad blood in both parties — during his time in office and set the stage for a massive purge of career agency staff who had long resisted conservative policies behind closed doors.
In February — slightly less than a month since Trump had taken office — Zeldin and other House Republicans asked lawmakers to use the CRA on California’s zero-emission sales rules for car and heavy-duty trucks, which would typically allow Congress to overturn agency regulations that were issued in the waning years of the last administration — such as the waiver Biden’s EPA gave its approval to in December 2024, letting that state set stronger-than-federal emissions standards for cars.
Zeldin’s move has ignited an intraparty debate among Republicans over whether to bend the rules of congressional procedure to invoke the CRA and erase California’s regulations, after Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — the influential arbiter of her chamber’s procedures — notified lawmakers that they’re technically not EPA regulations eligible for cancellation under the law.
That kind of stumble might have been fatal to a nail-biter vote in Trump’s first term, when the president was at odds with former senators like Arizona’s John McCain and Jeff Flake. But instead, Republican leadership — under the stewardship of Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) — managed to hold the caucus together and even gain one Democratic vote from Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin.
“The biggest difference is that Congress is very much willing to use its legislative authority to make sure that Trump’s unwind of climate policy doesn’t in fact take place,” Ann Carlson, who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under Biden, said. “When you have a Congress that is essentially the supplicants of the president, it’s sort of hard to stop.”
Conservative legal thinkers such as Gunasekara and Michael Buschbacher, a partner at Boyden Gray PLLC who represents biofuel refiner ICM Inc. and state corn groups that have paid for ethanol fuel production, an early promoter of the CRA maneuver, also attribute the administration’s victories to a core group of “professionalized” agency staff who used tighter executive control to move more aggressively than they previously could during Trump’s inaugural term.
At the top of that list is Aaron Szabo, a U.S. EPA staffer who began working for the agency under President Obama and now runs its air quality division. Other holdovers from Trump’s first term include people with names such as Alex Dominguez, a onetime American Petroleum Institute lobbyist leading EPA’s work on vehicle pollution, and Justin Schwab, another author of Project 2025 who is now general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
“The administration was totally overtaken by how the city works, who to trust, or what to do. There was just a pretty effective counterattack in trying to limit their effectiveness,” said Buschbacher. “They were on the back foot. You don’t have that problem this time.”
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers, who led a lawsuit brought by two dozen conservative states against truck-makers alleging that they were illicitly colluding to move toward electric technology, said he had worked closely with the F.T.C. chairman, Andrew Ferguson, to take a knife to the agreement.
“We had an administration that was involved and active: Instead of six months or eight months or 12 months waiting for the FTC to step in there, we actually did something,” Hilgers said in an interview.
The California boogeyman
There’s also California’s own race to enact ever more stringent EV rules in the Biden era, which has made the state an obvious industry target.
Though the state fostered agreements with carmakers including Ford, BMW and Honda during his first term to adopt relatively modest emissions standards and promote sales of electric vehicles, California’s plan calling for a ban on new-car sales of gasoline- and hybrid-powered cars as soon as 2035 — reflected in a Newsom executive order last year — galvanized opposition from the Auto Market and fossil fuel industry.
Newsom’s efforts, and the reality that electric vehicles remain pricier than their gas-powered counterparts, helped establish what Trump dubbed “the insane electric vehicle mandate” on the campaign trail as an easy target on his return to office.
“There was a bigger boogeyman and a much clearer, distinct boogeyman this go-around,” said Karen Bailey-Chapman, the senior vice president for public and government affairs at the Specialty Equipment Market Association, one of the most vociferous Auto Market voices against California’s E.V. rules.
California’s only hope now — at least in the short term — might rest on this Trump administration overplaying its hand.
The proposal, which is being spearheaded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would gut a rule that requires automakers to roughly double the fuel economy of new cars, pickups and sport utility vehicles by 2025.“If they’re threatening these cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and energy efficiency, then I think we are increasingly likely left with no alternative but for states to adopt their own rules,” said Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law who studies environmental laws.
All right, let me start with nothing: What happens if the federal government exits the business of regulating greenhouse gas emissions from transportation? In brief: If states aren’t preempted — we’ll come back to that part — they could fill that void without having to ask the E.P.A. for permission.
But even its champions concede it is ultimately a Hail Mary assault in the face of an administration that has played hardball since day one and may not withstand a conservative Supreme Court dominated by Trump appointees.
“It’s just this amazingly aggressive, and I think legally highly questionable desire to crush anyone who disagrees with them,” Carlson said.
Original article published in Politico https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/22/trump-california-electric-vehicle-mandate-00701691
