Rethinking climate regulation from the ground up

It can be stomach-turning, watching the Trump administration torch federal climate policy. But what if some of what's burning wasn't working particularly well to begin with? Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman of the Federation of American Scientists' Center for Regulatory Ingenuity make the case, not for defending or trying to rebuild the status quo regulatory regime, but for imagining something better. (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Okay. Hello, everyone. Greetings, salutations. This is Volts for April 3, 2026: “Rethinking climate regulation from the ground up.” I’m your host, David Roberts. The Trump administration is dismantling federal climate policy at dizzying speed. The endangerment finding, the IRA, California’s vehicle standards — it’s all under assault, much of it already dead and gone. If you work in climate, you’re familiar with the sickening feeling of watching years of work get torched in real time. The instinctive reaction can be to defend what remains and fight to get back what was lost — to try to restore the pre-Trump status quo. My guests today think that instinct, while understandable, should be interrogated, not because the rollbacks aren’t bad (they are) but because some of what’s being rolled back wasn’t working particularly well to begin with. The tools we built to fight industrial pollution in the 1970s were never really designed to replace an entire fossil fuel economy with something new. And the mismatch between those tools and the actual task in front of us has been accumulating for decades. Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman are the co-leads of the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity, a new initiative at the Federation of American Scientists. Their argument, in short, is that the opposite of DOGE isn’t a return to the status quo, it’s something better — a government redesigned to actually deliver the clean energy transition. As Volts listeners know, I am a longtime lover of administrative capacity and a well-designed bureaucracy — listen to my episode with political scientist Doug Thompson, defending the deep state — so naturally this effort caught my eye. I have all kinds of questions! We’re going to get into what’s wrong with existing regulatory design, what a renewed administrative state would look like, and whether any of this is politically viable on our seemingly cursed timeline. With no further ado, Hannah Safford and Loren Schulman, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Loren Schulman Thanks for having us. Hannah Safford Really glad to be here. David Roberts Let’s start with both of you, in turn. There’s a ton I want to cover, but let’s start very briefly at the beginning, just so listeners can get a sense of who they’re hearing from. Maybe each of you can tell us a little bit about your background and the thread of your work that led you to this. Let’s start with you, Hannah. Hannah Safford I am trained as a scientist, trained as an engineer. That was where I got my start, but then began working in federal policy at the White House from an early age. Did a stint under the Obama administration from 2014 to 2016, had a great time there, went back, did deeper technical expertise, and then came back and was doing federal policy work again under the Biden admin. In both of those terms of service, in both the Obama administration and the Biden administration, working on climate policy, it was two very different sets of tools that those administrations were working with. Obama was trying to push forward climate policy through a lot of executive orders because it was running into all kinds of roadblocks on the Hill with appropriations. The Biden administration had more money but ran into implementation challenges and pushed hard on ambitious regulatory standards, only then to see those get reversed in the second Trump administration. And now the work that I started doing at FAS and trying to think about what the next chapter of climate policy looks like, it is very clear to me that though there was a tremendous amount of ambition and expertise in both the Obama and Biden administrations and motivation to move on climate, the tools that we had to push that forward weren’t getting the job done in any way that was deeply effective and durable and matched to the pace of the challenge. That’s where I come at it from. David Roberts How about you, Loren? Loren Schulman My background is pretty different. I started my government career in the national security space during the Bush administration, going into the Obama administration, working at the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. This was, listeners may remember, prime counterinsurgency global war on terror era, where we frequently would make announcements about a shift in strategy — a shift in approach about being a more people-centric, people-enabling strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq from the military perspective, and also how the military would work with the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and others. It would be at best headline-deep, and all the decisions around personnel and funding and decision-making and how they would work together would be assumed — “oh, we’ll figure that out.” People will also recommend we did not figure a lot of that out. I saw the same narrative play over and over again in different spaces as the United States NSC apparatus started moving more towards using sanctions, an incredibly effective national security tool. There were so few people at Treasury or State who were capable of helping identify potential targets for this, but more importantly, possible risks and impacts. Similarly, I remember years later as we started being able to say the words out loud, industrial policy or technology strategy, people making assumptions around supply chain risk and so on — “these are the policies we need to set” — and me thinking in the back of my head, Department of Commerce has maybe one person who can do that. We need an entire — David Roberts You and what army? Hannah Safford Yes, exactly. Loren Schulman I gradually shifted from being a national security policy person, which I still care deeply about, to somebody who cares about government capacity. Not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of roles, relationships, decision-making, feedback loops. Are we hearing from people about the impacts that we need and the ability to not be so rules-driven and compliance-focused, but more, are we actually able to meet the outcomes that we talked about? I served as a career official in NSC and DoD for about 10 years, left government for a while to work in the national security think tank, but then decided it was important to have this focus on capacity and move it over to the Partnership for Public Service, and spent more recent time in the Biden administration at OMB. My title was so boring: the Associate Director for Personnel and Performance Management. David Roberts Unlike most OMB jobs, which are just sexy. Loren Schulman Scintillating, yeah. But this one is the engine. My sexy title that I said for myself was, “we are the engine room of democracy.” We are the folks who are making sure you’ve got the people, the measurement, the evidence, all of that. If you’re doing a good job. I left at the end of the Biden administration. I’ve been working with Hannah since last fall on both this effort and new efforts to think about what is the future of government, both what should it be from a vision perspective. But then also, no matter what vision we have, do we have those building blocks, those Lego pieces to actually get the job done? David Roberts You must be — given the character of your critiques of what you saw in the defense apparatus — delighted with what’s going on right now. Whatever remainder of competent implementation you saw when you were there, we’ve wiped that out now. I wonder, did you — this is to both of you, I guess — was it on purpose that you are launching this thing simult…