Federal climate policy has effectively ceased to function in the United States. Since retaking power last year, the Trump administration has relentlessly and systematically stripped back incentives and regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
On the foreign-policy front, the United States is now absent not only from the Paris Agreement, but also the International Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (officially as of January 2027), and most other international fora concerned with the climate crisis. The administration has also dismantled many federal offices that implement climate policy, including the State Department’s Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and the White House’s Climate Policy Office.
It is trite but still worthwhile to note that the impacts of these actions will extend far beyond the next U.S. election. As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, the effects of climate change—including extreme weather, sea level rise, and disease outbreaks—will make Americans poorer, sicker, and more vulnerable.
The next president will face the daunting challenge of rebuilding U.S. climate policy. But amid the wreckage left by the Trump administration, the next leader will also have more latitude than any in recent memory to reimagine how the U.S. government addresses the climate crisis. The next U.S. administration would do well not only to learn from previous policy regimes, but also to reconsider the very concept of “climate policy.”
Protesters in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1970. Bettman Archive/via Getty Images
On the heels of successive victories in the 1970s, the U.S. environmental movement—heretofore concerned primarily with local pollution—found itself confronting a challenge of global proportions. Advances in climate science, most famously highlighted by Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress, showed that greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel combustion were changing the composition of the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic and worldwide consequences.
Alarm over global warming, later termed climate change, motivated a raft of policies to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. government began subsidizing wind and solar energy in the hope that they would eventually supplant more carbon-intensive sources of electricity. It also signed onto the UNFCCC, laying the groundwork for decades of international coordination on climate.
As scientists’ understanding of the climate grew, so did the realm of what was considered climate policy. Carbon dioxide, it turned out, was leaking from nearly every sector of the economy, including cars, power plants, factories, farms, and landfills. And carbon dioxide wasn’t the only cause of climate change; so-called super pollutants such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons were also raising temperatures. It became clear that mitigating climate change would require addressing a multitude of emissions sources. It would have to be an all-of-society effort.
Efforts to address emissions, too, spawned their own complexities. Carbon-free energy would require more copper and lithium, demanding increased attention to these supply chains. The uneven burden of—and responsibility for—climate change demanded that policy interventions consider preexisting inequities. All the while, new tensions emerged as nations stumbled unevenly towards emissions reductions.
By the time U.S. President Joe Biden took office, the slate of climate-related issues facing policymakers had grown dizzyingly broad. Recognizing this, Biden pledged a “whole-of-government” approach to climate change, enlisting the capabilities and portfolios of each federal agency. He established a Climate Policy Office within the White House to coordinate among them. Led first by Gina McCarthy and then by Ali Zaidi, this small team became the heartbeat of the Biden administration’s climate platform.
Then-U.S. President Joe Biden announces a $7 billion “Solar For All” program at a park in Triangle, Virginia, on April 22, 2024. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The approach yielded major victories. The Biden administration announced an ambitious new emissions reduction target, reoriented federal procurement toward low-carbon technologies, tightened vehicle emissions standards, imposed new restrictions on coal power plants, created a detailed plan for reducing methane emissions, and employed 15,000 young people in the nation’s first-ever Climate Corps. Along the way, it obligated more than $97 billion of federal funds to clean energy, electric vehicles, conservation, and other provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). If preserved, these interventions would have prevented hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
The approach also encountered challenges. The Department of Energy may have spent as little as 39 percent of its IRA funding before the clock ran out on Biden’s term. The Loan Programs Office, the workhorse of the department’s support for clean energy, ended the administration with more than 160 outstanding loan applications worth more than $200 billion. Among the reasons for the delays, according to Energy Department employees at the time, were frequent and significant interventions by the White House that failed to empower the office to move expeditiously. Others faulted the White House’s interest in advancing multiple, sometimes conflicting, aims at once.
Elsewhere, the administration’s climate ambitions ran headlong into agency priorities. In 2021, Biden pledged to end public financing of fossil fuel infrastructure abroad. This announcement caused tension at two public financing agencies, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank (EXIM). Employees at both organizations viewed their ability to finance natural gas plants as a valuable tool for enhancing electricity access, bolstering diplomatic relations, and displacing dirtier energy sources. Many chafed at what they saw as impractical political restrictions, and EXIM continued to support fossil fuel projects.
Lastly, the procession of top-down, explicitly climate-oriented policies left an easy list of targets for a subsequent administration already intent on unwinding environmental protections. Rather than addressing the systemic drivers of rising electricity prices, the Trump administration blamed them on “ideologically motivated regulations,” a useful pretext for slashing much of the Biden administration’s energy policy.
Under Trump, the White House has reversed the Biden administration’s fuel economy standards, repealed its coal power plants rule, nullified its emissions reduction target, stopped enforcing methane regulations, canceled $2.5 billion of the Department of Energy’s clean energy awards under the IRA, and attempted to halt wind farm development—all while citing the previous administration for elevating climate concerns over economic opportunity.
Wind turbines generate electricity near Block Island, Rhode Island, on July 7, 2022. John Moore/Getty Images
The delays and transience that characterized the Biden administration’s climate agenda were not the results of mismanagement or misplaced priorities. Rather, they were the consequences of an outdated policy paradigm that no longer suits the climate challenge.
Climate policy refers to government actions to address both the negative impacts of human activity on the climate, or mitigation, and the negative impacts of a changing climate on society, or adaptation. In the 1990s, when national governments first came together to address climate change, this definition encompassed a manageable set of interventions. Today, however, the bounds of what constitutes climate policy have grown so broad as to be meaningless.
This is evident in the basic functions of government. Today’s architects of climate policy are united by little more than a shared concern about greenhouse gas emissions. The daily concerns of a diplomat negotiating a climate agreement bear a paltry resemblance to those of a program manager allocating sustainable farming grants. The regulator tracking methane emissions from oil and gas wells has little overlap with the administrator setting rules for climate-resilient housing.
All can reasonably be said to be administering climate policy—and indeed their actions materially advance mitigation and adaptation—but there is almost nothing in their quotidian tasks to suggest that they share the same policy domain. Attempting to group these disparate roles under a single umbrella ignores an underlying truth: There is no such thing, functionally or thematically, as climate policy.
Policy domains are defined by a distinct set of concerns, instruments, and implementing agencies. Monetary policy addresses inflation and employment through interest rates, reserve requirements, and discount rates; it flows primarily through the U.S. Federal Reserve. Education policy promotes improved learning outcomes and school stewardship through funding allocation, standards, and research; it is chiefly implemented by the Education Department.
Even foreign policy has a defined issue (events outside the country), a defined set of tools (diplomacy, economic pressure, and military force), and a group of implementing agencies (including but not limited to the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Commerce Department).
That climate change affects nearly every U.S. agency—and nearly every agency has a plausible toolkit for addressing it—suggests that climate policy is no longer a meaningful policy domain.
None of this is to denigrate the urgency of the climate crisis, nor to suggest that responsibility for addressing it should not be shared throughout the U.S. government. Global temperatures are likely to surpass 1.5˚C of warming by the end of the decade, with potentially dire consequences for all facets of life. Seeing climate policy for what it really is—an awkward grouping of distinct policy realms—opens up new opportunities to make federal climate action more potent, more endemic, and more durable.
Protesters at a really near COP21 in Paris on Dec. 12, 2015. Francois Guillot/AFP via Getty Images
The emergence of centrally organized climate action was originally a practical expression of the issue’s urgency and scale. After Hansen’s congressional testimony, sustained activist campaigns pressed the U.S. government to move decisively, with demands for action intensifying as the window of opportunity grew narrower.
Successive Democratic administrations endeavored to answer the call for bold leadership by proposing and enacting increasingly ambitious and high-visibility policies. Having the White House coordinate and promulgate these policy agendas demonstrated a level of serious intent that could not replicated by quieter and more dispersed interventions, however effective.
Moreover, the nature of the climate crisis itself appeared to lend itself to top-down policymaking. For much of the 21st century, climate progress has found itself crosswise of market forces. The clean energy technologies necessary to limit greenhouse gas emissions could not yet compete on cost with fossil fuels, nor were private investors inclined to splash out the trillions of dollars required to get the economy on track for net zero. It was clear that correcting these market failures would require robust, carefully planned government intervention.
This was not an outcome that individual agencies, or even individual governments, could achieve by acting independently. Climate change was a collective action problem requiring a coordinated solution.
While these pressures remain, the math has shifted. Wind turbines and solar panels are now the most affordable sources of electricity even without government support, and batteries are increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuels. In some countries, renewables have become sufficiently attractive to trigger a rapid and unplanned energy transition, undercutting the case for centrally planned climate action. Meanwhile, shifting politics and a cost-of-living crisis—exacerbated by high oil prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—have led climate advocates to opt for affordability messaging, reducing pressure on the federal government to foreground climate concerns. Under the current circumstances, grouping climate concerns under a unified policy platform could undercut rather than advance climate progress.
International climate agreements offer a cautionary example. Nearly every year since 1995, national governments have sent representatives to a summit of the UNFCCC to hammer out a global plan of action. This process has delivered momentous achievements, most famously in 2015, when the landmark Paris Agreement compelled countries to develop increasingly ambitious emissions reductions targets. But the shortcomings of the process were long apparent. Wrangling 195 parties and all greenhouse gas-emitting sectors into a single pledge limited the ambition and enforceability of these agreements, constraining their ability to bend the emissions curve.
Though these agreements provided valuable direction to global climate action, the urgency of the crisis now demands more targeted and concrete interventions. Recent trade disputes with China threatened to choke off U.S. developers’ supply of cheap clean energy components, endangering the United States’ ability to decarbonize its electricity grid. In this environment, the most important international climate agreement the next administration makes is unlikely to be a UNFCCC accord, but instead a bilateral trade agreement to ensure the continued flow of clean energy technologies.
Absorbing this objective into a more expansive climate agreement would only serve to divert diplomatic resources away from a measurable, enforceable output. In this case, as in others, the construct of climate policy obscures action on more defined issues.
U.S. President Donald Trump holds an executive order announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
This is about more than mere semantics. Retiring the prevailing definition of climate policy could enable the Democratic Party to pursue a fundamentally new approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation, one better suited to the nature of the federal government. Rather than centralizing decision-making in the White House, the next Democratic administration should empower the experts at federal agencies to use the tools at their disposal to reduce emissions.
Incidentally, the Paris Agreement offers a useful template for how this approach could work. The genius of this framework was in its acknowledgement of its own limitations. Realizing that few countries would agree to rules set by an external authority, the authors allowed each signatory to propose their own emission reduction plans—based on what their governments perceived to be achievable—and exposed them to public scrutiny to elevate their ambition.
A similar arrangement for the federal government would see each agency wield its own policy tools and expertise for progress on climate. Federal agencies would submit to the White House a plan for addressing climate change within their particular domain, along with a measurable emissions reduction target for the ensuing years. Each agency would rely on its own experts— with their years of experience in that domain—to assess where emissions reductions can be achieved and what levers that agency might pull to realize them.
The role of the White House would be more limited than under previous administrations, but nevertheless important. The Climate Policy Office (or its successor) would be charged with accepting and evaluating agencies’ climate plans. White House officials would operate more as accountants than as policymakers, tracking each agency’s progress against its targets. Certain cross-cutting initiatives would still likely require White House coordination.
But whenever possible, the next administration should resist the urge to roll out splashy, top-down programs, instead allowing climate considerations to quietly permeate the regular operations of federal agencies. Decentralizing and diffusing climate action into the federal bureaucracy would make it more targeted and likely to last. It would acknowledge that though most Americans want the federal government to tackle climate change, fewer prioritize it over public safety, the cost of living, or the economy. Climate action embedded into agency policymaking would reframe it as complementary to other objectives, not a competing priority.
All this would make rolling back climate progress a more complicated task for later administrations. In Trump’s second term, the White House moved quickly to rescind Biden’s climate directives, such as the Executive Order on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs Through Federal Sustainability, which committed the federal government to procuring clean energy. More distributed climate initiatives, particularly those lacking an explicit climate rationale, would require far more time and effort to identify and eliminate. Energy procurement plans at each federal agency implemented without the direction of an executive order would become at least more challenging to roll back than with the stroke of a president’s pen.
This approach certainly comes with risk. It demands trust in civil servants and would require a substantial rehiring effort, with so many federal employees already in exodus. It may also fuel a perception that a future administration is not prioritizing climate action, which could come with political blowback. But the climate-concerned public has already grown frustrated with agendas that over-promise and under-deliver; a quiet yet effective approach is exactly what is needed. With discipline and sustained commitment, each of these risks is manageable—and well worth the potential upsides to emissions reduction and climate resilience.
If Democrats retake the White House in the 2028 elections, they will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild the U.S. government’s climate apparatus from the ground up. To capitalize on this opportunity, policy leaders must begin by interrogating the basic premise of climate policy that has undergirded previous platforms—and that process must begin today.
