Giving Compass' Take:

• The Natural Resources Defence Council and other nonprofits have been suing the Trump Administration's EPA over the illegal removal of regulations - causing the Administration to back down on several fronts. 

• Is suing to force the EPA into legal compliance an effective use of resources? Why are suits necessary to keep the EPA from breaking the law?  

• Find out how government climate information has changed since Trump took office.

Twelve days after Donald Trump took office in 2017, the nonprofit environmental advocacy group NRDC filed its first lawsuit against the new administration, fighting an EPA rollback of a protection against mercury pollution.

To date, the nonprofit has sued the Trump administration around 50 times. Those are just the new lawsuits; the organization has also taken on cases to defend final actions taken by the Obama administration that were later challenged by industry, and which the new administration refused to defend.

Aaron Colangelo, the nonprofit’s litigation director said“It started right away. It started on midnight, or shortly before midnight, on the night of the inauguration.”

That night, the president’s chief of staff signed a memo to freeze or suspend any agency rules from the Obama administration that hadn’t yet gone into effect. That included the mercury rule, which required dental offices to install a simple system to catch old fillings before mercury, a neurotoxin, could go down drains and enter waterways.

By June, because of the lawsuit, the EPA reinstated the protection. “That case established a pattern that we then saw recur over the next few months in particular, which was that the administration would do something blatantly illegal, we would sue or others would sue, and before even defending themselves in court, the Trump administration would back down,” says Colangelo.

Read the full article about keeping the EPA in line by Adele Peters at FastCompany.