Federal Trade Commission Blows Up California Clean Truck Partnership

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In 2023, nine manufacturers of heavy-duty trucks and engines entered into a Clean Truck Partnership agreement with the California Air Resources Board in which they promised to comply with that state’s exhaust emissions rules, come what may. The come what may, of course, was specifically a revocation of California’s long held exemption from compliance with EPA exhaust emission rules if there was a change in government in Washington.

That change did in fact take place in January of this year and the new administration is bound and determined to force Americans to breathe dirtier air because doing so is good for the fossil fuel industry. The plan is to remove all restrictions on emissions from power plants, automobiles, trucks, buses, manufacturing, farming, indoor cooking devices, residential heating equipment, or mineral extraction, because limiting them costs business money, which would be better applied to increasing the wealth of corporations and people who are already obscenely wealthy.

Since January, the EPA has been hammering away at that emissions waiver for California and has now used the power of the Federal Trade Commission to cram even more MAGA-style ideology down California’s throat. But to do so, first the administration had to fire two Democrats who were members of the commission and replace them with stooges who would dutifully take their orders directly from the Offal Office.

One of the commissioners has since resigned, but a federal court ruled in July that the other, Rebecca Slaughter, was fired illegally and ordered that she be reinstated. But the damage has been done. The FTC is now a puppet of the White House and is carrying out its part of the Project 2025 plan that no one has read and everyone assumes is just about rounding up illegal aliens, but is actually so much more.

The newly reconstituted FTC then put forth the argument that the Clean Truck Partnership was anti-competitive and an affront to the good people of the United States, who enjoy sucking down diesel exhaust pollution with every breath. The upshot of the whole fiasco is that on August 11, 2025, four members of the Clean Truck Partnership filed suit in federal court asking to be relieved of their obligations under the Partnership.

“CARB’s regulatory overreach posed a major threat to American trucking and, in our view, presented serious antitrust concerns,” said Taylor Hoogendoorn, deputy director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC. “The Bureau is pleased that the leading heavy-duty truck manufacturers agreed to a course correction. The Commission’s swift action will put the Clean Truck Partnership squarely in the rearview mirror and prevent repeats of CARB’s troubling regulatory gambit.” Yeah, how dare a state seek to protect its citizens from heath risks?

“The OEMs are in an impossible position,” Daimler, Volvo, International Motors, and PACCAR argued in the court filing according to Politico. “The OEMs are subject to two sovereigns whose regulatory requirements are irreconcilable and who are openly hostile to one another. Each wields a hammer to enforce its will on industry, leaving OEMs — who simply seek to sell heavy-duty trucks in compliance with the law — unable to plan with the necessary certainty and clarity where their products need to be certified for sale and by which regulatory authority.”

Chaos Theory

They truck manufacturers do have a point, but that obscures what is going on behind the curtain. Chaos is actually a very effective strategy for exerting control over others. I have worked for people who employed chaos theory very effectively to solidity their power within an organization. When no one knows what is going on, opportunities for dominance abound, and dominance is precisely the intent of Project 2025.

Proponents of not breathing crud — seriously, who would want to out their mouth around the exhaust stack of a Class 8 tractor? — are outraged. The action by the FTC came at almost the same time as the Justice Department sent a cease and desist letter to CARB over its heavy-duty truck rules. “The Clean Truck Partnership was designed exactly for a moment like this,” said Adam Zuckerman, senior clean vehicles campaigner with Public Citizen’s Climate Program.

CARB declined a Politico request for a comment, but former CARB official Craig Segall, who helped negotiate the 2023 deal, said the FTC action represents a significant softening of California’s regulatory authority. “It’s bad,” Segall said about the potential impacts to the state’s pollution-reduction efforts. “They’re still going to sell some electric trucks, but it’s somewhere between bupkis and inadequate.”

Just exactly how the other parties to the Clean Truck Partnership — Cummins, Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — will react after not joining the lawsuit or being named in the FTC announcement is unclear. A spokesperson for Hino Motors declined to comment, while the other companies didn’t respond immediately to requests for comment. The Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, which joined the FTC agreement but not the lawsuit, also didn’t respond.

Politico says California still has Stellantis on its side, at least in the light-duty sector. It signed a separate agreement last year in which it agreed to follow the CARB’s EV sales rules and reaffirmed its commitment in June after the so-called president signed a resolution revoking the EPA waiver California needs to enforce it.

Segall believes the retreat from the Clean Truck Partnership will not interrupt the long-term global trend toward zero-emission models that will benefit California. He said the state still has tools at its disposal, like offering incentives for companies and fleets that buy electric trucks, and excluding those that don’t. “It’s not like there’s any statute making California buy from these [companies], or any statute requiring it to provide particular incentives to them,” he said.

California could put that plan into action soon. State agencies are supposed to deliver recommendations for bolstering the EV market to Governor Newsom this week, after the governor signed a June executive order that directed CARB to start developing new regulations and suggested the state offer preferential treatment to companies that continue to work towards electrification goals.

It should now be abundantly clear to everyone that this failed administration will use its power to bolster corporate interests over those of the people of the United States at every opportunity. The Supine Court cleared the way for this fascist takeover of the US last year when it ruled there were virtually no limits on the power of the executive branch. Faux News will celebrate this new outrage, which is but another step in the plan for right-wing tyranny promulgated by the Heritage Foundation. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.