DOJ drops its antitrust probe against automakers
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has dropped its antitrust inquiry into four automakers that had sided with California in its dispute with the Trump administration over reducing climatewarming vehicle pollution, deciding that the companies had violated no laws, according to people familiar with the matter.
The i nvestigation, launched last September, had escalated a dispute over one of President Donald Trump’s most significant rollbacks of global warming regulations. The Justice Department’s move was one of a slew of seemingly retributive actions by the White House against California, as the state worked with Ford Motor Co., Volkswagen of America, Honda and BMW to defy Trump’s planned rollback of national fuel economy standards.
A spokeswoman from Ford confirmed last week that the company had been notified that the investigation was closed. Representatives from BMW, Volkswagen and Honda did not respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department did not release a statement.
The Justice Department’s decision could boost the efforts of the auto companies and California to move ahead with tighter vehicle pollution standards than those being finalized by the federal government.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, welcomed the news. “These trumped-up charges were always a sham — a blatant attempt by the Trump administration to prevent more automakers from joining California and agreeing to stronger emissions standards,”
In July, the four automakers announced that they had reached an agreement in principle with California on emissions standards that would be stricter than those being sought by the White House. The announcement came as an embarrassment for the Trump administration, which assailed the move as a “PR stunt.”
The Justice Department then opened an investigation into whether the four automakers violated federal antitrust laws by working together to reach their deal with California, on the grounds that the agreement could potentially limit consumer choice.
At the time Makan Delrahim, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, wrote in an opinion article in USA Today that the investigation was not politically motivated.
In the months after California struck the deal with the automakers, the administration and Justice Department pushed an unusual series of legal and policy moves against California and the auto companies that backed the state’s climate change plan. In September, the Trump administration formally revoked California’s legal authority to set tougher statelevel vehicle emissions standards than those set by the federal government.
The Justice Department then filed suit to force California to drop the Canadian province of Quebec from its carbon emissions market, a central effort to limit greenhouse gases from power plants by capping emissions and forcing polluters to buy permits to emit climate-warming carbon dioxide. The Justice Department argued that including Quebec was tantamount to a state illegally conducting foreign policy.
Also in September, the Environmental Protection Agency threatened to withhold federal highway funding from California if it did not address a decadeslong backlog of air pollution control plans.
In the coming weeks, the administration is expected to finalize a rule that would permanently roll back the federal Obama- era standards, which would have required automakers to roughly double the fuel economy of their new cars, pickup trucks and SUVs by 2025.
Under those rules, new vehicles would have had to average about 54 mpg. The Trump administration’s plan will roll back that standard to about 40 mpg.