The Trump Administration Is Fighting a Losing Battle Against Local Energy Laws

The Trump administration’s latest attempt to dismantle a local energy law could test whether President Donald Trump’s energy agenda can endure mounting legal headwinds.

The Justice Department asked a federal judge last week to deem Morris Township, New Jersey’s 2022 ban on gas-powered and other nonelectric appliances in new apartments unlawful. The lawsuit is the latest effort by the administration to dismantle state and local environmental laws that it argues are “overly restrictive” — a campaign it started exactly a year ago with an executive order.

Over the past year, federal courts have regularly handed the administration and aligned industry groups losses, largely protecting local policy from the president’s oil and gas agenda.

Federal judges ruled in two separate cases last week that the Energy Policy and Conservation Act — the federal law Trump’s team is citing to claim that Morris Township’s gas hookup ban is unlawful — does not preclude local and state governments from regulating energy consumption. The law gives the federal government power to regulate energy efficiency and labeling, but local and state governments can set their own standards for energy use, a judge in one of those cases ruled.

“The government is making the same arguments that all of these other cases have made using that same reasoning … that’s ultimately not been successful in other jurisdictions,” Vincent Nolette, who works on city-level climate change policies at the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Law, told NOTUS. “There’s good reason to think that a judge would continue to interpret EPCA as not preempting these local building laws.”

The Justice Department’s environmental suits have mostly focused on Democratic-leaning cities and states, attacking everything from climate superfund laws to local attempts to file litigation against oil and gas companies. Previous targets have included New York, Vermont, Michigan and Hawaii. The administration filed another lawsuit over a gas ban against two solidly blue California cities.

The federal government and natural gas industry groups have seen small wins in dismantling some local gas bans — a federal judge in California ruled in 2024 that Berkeley could not enforce a citywide gas ban, and the two California cities voluntarily rolled back their gas bans last month — but precedent in other parts of the country means the New Jersey town could come out on top, Nolette told NOTUS.

The Morris Township lawsuit is the first of its kind in a politically competitive area.

Morris Township’s leadership is mostly Democratic. But the town sits in a New Jersey county Trump won by a three-point margin in 2024 and that’s swung between Democrats and Republicans in recent presidential elections.

A spokesperson for Morris Township declined to comment on the lawsuit when reached by NOTUS.

Morris Township sits in a part of the country that’s been especially hard-hit by rising energy prices. The average utility bill for New Jersey consumers has gone up by more than 40% over the past two years, an increase that’s almost five times higher than the national average during that same time period.

“There is not a single family … that has not been affected by the rising cost of utilities, and I think that that’s what happens when you’ve got an administration that’s attacked renewables the way that they have,” said Brian Varela, a Democratic congressional candidate in New Jersey who’s looking to unseat Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.

Gas bans are complex, and industry groups have long argued that prohibiting gas hookups could leave consumers vulnerable to outages and increase reliance on natural gas outside of homes.

In the last year, the Trump administration has echoed those arguments, suggesting that state and local climate laws drive up costs for consumers.

Research has found that home electrification can be cost-effective and help drive down utility prices, a fact the administration has not addressed in its repeated attempts to dismantle local laws.

In a statement about the Morris Township lawsuit, for example, Trump’s Justice Department called gas bans a “radical left effort” and claimed the town was “kowtowing to progressive fearmongering.” And in its case to undo a state-level climate law in Vermont, the department said the state had made a “brazen attempt to grab power from the federal government.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment from NOTUS about how much it has spent on litigation against state and local climate-related laws since last year’s executive order from the president.

But multiple people told NOTUS the administration’s string of legal challenges against those laws have been unprecedented.

“This administration has been anti-climate in a way that it wasn’t in the first administration,” Nolette said. “Directly suing local governments, directly suing state governments over certain climate laws … this is all somewhat an escalation from the previous Trump administration.”