The attorneys general of fifteen states (led by Washington and California) filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on May 9, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuit contests the federal government’s use of a so-called “energy emergency” to bypass critical ecological, historical, and cultural resources review.
The complaint calls on the court to rule that 1) President Trump’s Executive Order (“EO”) declaring a national energy emergency is unlawful; 2) efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers (“Corps”) and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (“ACHP”) to carry out the EO are arbitrary and capricious; and 3) federal agencies cannot authorize emergency permitting procedures for non-emergency projects.
The states warn that the EO “commands that federal agencies disregard the law and in many cases their own regulations to fast-track extensive categories of activities [that] will result in damage to waters, wetlands, critical habitat, historic and cultural resources, endangered species, and the people and wildlife that rely on these precious resources.” (See states’ lawsuit, 2). As CHP explained during our Emergency Strategy Session webinar, the ACHP and the Corps, among other federal agencies, are using sweeping emergency procedures to skip conducting surveys to find sensitive cultural sites, stifle public opportunities to comment on the process, and ignore the adverse effects of federal projects on historic properties.
The states contend that this invocation of emergency procedures crosses the boundaries of executive authority, violates the original intent of emergency procedures as a stopgap measure typically used in the case of natural disasters, and operates on an entirely false premise—that the US is facing a shortage of energy that amounts to a national emergency.
Congress drafted the National Emergencies Act to restrict presidential emergency powers to situations “when emergencies actually exist,” not for “frivolous or partisan matters” or where important but not essential matters are at stake (50 U.S.C. § 1621(a); S. Rep. No. 94-1168, at 2 (1976); Hearing on H.R. 3884 Before the S. Comm. of Governmental Operations, 94th Cong. 7 (1976)). The lawsuit cites evidence of the United States’ robust energy production and net export of domestic energy and points to case law from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that has held that the National Emergencies Act does not expand the powers of the executive branch beyond those in existing law (Sierra Club v. Trump, 977 F.3d 853, 864–65 (9th Cir. 2020), vacated on other grounds, Biden v. Sierra Club, 142 S. Ct. 56 (2021)).
The states’ complaint asserts that the Army Corps and the Advisory Council violated federal law in advancing the President’s agenda. For its part, by extending the use of Section 106’s emergency provisions indefinitely beyond their thirty-day limit, the Advisory Council ignored the regulations’ purpose: to address immediate threats to life or property such as those that follow a natural disaster when expedited emergency response is needed to bolster public safety.
The states contend that their proprietary interests, sovereign interests, and quasi-sovereign interests have suffered direct harm from the implementation of the emergency procedures, which severely limit states’ ability to protect water quality and resources, habitat, and historical and cultural resources within their respective territories.
The Administration’s response to the lawsuit is expected during the summer.