Sacramento-led lawsuit challenges Trump energy emergency declaration as states say rising production undermines claims of a national crisis

Sacramento, California – California Attorney General Rob Bonta has returned to federal court with another lawsuit against the Trump administration. He says that a “national energy emergency” that was declared early last year is being used to illegally weaken protections for the environment. The updated case adds the U.S. Department of the Interior as a defendant to an existing multistate litigation.

The disagreement is about an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on January 20, 2025, that used the National Emergencies Act to declare an energy emergency. That proclamation set off a chain of orders advising federal agencies to speed up the approval process for energy-related projects.

The alliance of states says that the directive is based on an incorrect assumption and wrongly uses emergency powers that were never supposed to be used for normal energy development.

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State officials argue that the United States is not facing an energy shortage.

“We do not have a national energy emergency, period. Yet the President is fabricating one to continue to line the pockets of big corporations,” said Attorney General Bonta.

In the past few years, national production levels have continued to rise, which goes against arguments that something remarkable has to be done. The executive order has been used to speed up the approval process for fossil fuel projects, but it has also slowed down or put on hold wind and solar projects that the states argue are both cost-effective and widely available.

In the new filing, the coalition says that the Department of the Interior has used the emergency declaration to get around important legislative obligations that are designed to safeguard the environment and the public interest. The complaint says that the government has broken laws such the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act by approving energy projects.

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The complaint was first aimed at things that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation did. After the executive order, the Corps put in place special emergency processing procedures under the Clean Water Act. This meant that some projects might skip normal review phases. Other federal authorities gave similar advice, saying that the declared emergency was a good reason for it.

The states say that emergency procedures have always been used for actual and urgent situations, like natural disasters and major environmental disasters. They say that using such tools when there isn’t an emergency takes away public scrutiny and weakens the protections that Congress placed in place.

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Bonta and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown are in charge of the legal fight. Attorneys general from more than a dozen other states have joined the case, signaling a broad challenge to the administration’s use of emergency authority and its impact on federal environmental law.

“I filed a lawsuit with a coalition of attorneys general challenging the President’s unlawful declaration, and now we’re going back to court to block the Department of Interior’s illegal actions pursuant to his directive. We will not let the Trump Administration illegally bypass important environmental protections and will continue to hold them accountable for breaking the law,” Bonta added.

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Attorney General Bonta is leading this lawsuit with Washington Attorney General Nick Brown. They are joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.