The judge said an administration had the right to reverse a previous policy, but still must back up its reason for doing so with facts. The Trump administration did not do that, Judge Morris found.
“The Department instead simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal,” he wrote. He cited a United States Supreme Court ruling that noted, “An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past, any more than it can ignore inconvenient facts when it writes on a blank slate.”
