Department of Transportation

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued an interpretive rule on June 11, 2025 titled Resetting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Program. It sets out the factors the agency reads the law to forbid it from considering when it sets maximum feasible standards under the 1975 and 2007 statutes, describes this as the legal foundation for bringing both the passenger car program and the medium and heavy duty program into compliance with those statutes, and says the agency will exercise its enforcement authority over existing standards according to that reading. That is the chapter's argument about statutory limits carried into agency practice. The fit breaks down because an interpretive rule does not set mileage numbers: replacement standards are left to a later rulemaking, so the levels the chapter asks for, feasible for combustion vehicles, are not yet in place, and the rule takes no position on returning to model year 2020 levels.

The Federal Register summary of this final rule of February 18, 2026 records the Environmental Protection Agency rescinding the 2009 findings of contribution and endangerment and repealing all greenhouse gas emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles and engines, on the agency's reading that section 202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act does not authorize standards set in response to global climate change concerns. That removes the federal carbon limits on vehicles that the passage says must not override the fuel economy standards Congress assigned to the Transportation Department, so the clash the chapter describes no longer arises. The fit breaks down because the passage assumes such limits continue and asks only that they support and work in harmony with the Transportation Department's standards, offering air conditioning systems as an example of what the environmental agency might still regulate, while the rule concludes the agency has no authority to set vehicle greenhouse gas standards at all. The rule states no relationship between the two agencies, and neither the 1975 energy statute nor the Transportation Department appears in what the site holds, which for this document is the rule's own summary rather than its full text.

Executive Order 14267 of April 9, 2025 opens with the statement that federal regulations should not predetermine economic winners and losers, and directs every agency head, including at the Transportation Department, to review all regulations under their rulemaking authority with the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorney General and identify those that create monopolies, raise barriers to entry, or otherwise limit competition, with a view to rescinding them. It adopts the chapter's premise and turns it into a concrete review. The fit breaks down because it acts on regulations that restrict competition between firms and does not reach the government backing particular technologies through funding or promotion, and it says nothing about who bears the liability when a technology underperforms or about the department's role in overseeing testing and deployment.