Originally published in The Revelator. Reprinted under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
In recent months the Trump administration has intensified its assault on federal environmental safeguards on several fronts. It has proposed drastic reductions in the scope of protections against water and air pollution, lagged in the cleanup of hazardous waste contamination, allowed the continued marketing of toxic herbicides, narrowed the scope of needed environmental impact reviews, ignored and undermined legitimate scientific studies and findings, and dismantled government attempts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.
Every bit as disturbing, but much less discussed, is a discouraging deterioration in the rigor of EPA’s once-effective enforcement program, which identifies and punishes polluters that skirt federal regulations.
The agency’s latest enforcement statistics reflect a dramatic decline in injunctive relief — the amount of money EPA-enforcement activities compelled polluters to commit to spending to correct their environmental violations and maintain compliance with the law. That crucial metric fell to its lowest level in 15 years, from $20.6 billion in 2017 to just $3.95 billion in 2018.
Similarly, statistics released recently by the U.S. Department of Justice indicate that the number of environmental criminal cases referred by EPA in 2018 declined to a shocking 20-year low. Though the agency’s enforcement efforts did have some legitimate successes in 2018 — particularly with respect to the control of lead contamination in public housing — the overall decline in enforcement still stands out.
EPA’s current enforcement strategy has emphasized the agency’s role in providing technical assistance to state environmental-enforcement programs, purportedly as an effective substitute for assertive federal enforcement efforts. However, most states can’t fill that federal role: Over the past decade numerous state environmental agencies have experienced major budget cuts. These cuts forced the elimination of 4,400 state-agency staff positions, and many of those layoffs have had a markedly detrimental effect on state-level environmental enforcement.
On top of this, a good number of states simply lack the political will to pursue meaningful enforcement actions against polluters. Making things even worse, the EPA has completely dropped its traditional oversight of state enforcement programs — a policy change that appears to have bolstered the resolve of anti-safeguard states to eliminate every vestige of environmental enforcement.
Is the worst yet to come? Near the end of last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced an additional gift to polluters and pro-industry ideologues when it issued a notice inviting the public “to identify additional reforms that will ensure adequate due process in regulatory enforcement.” The plain premise of this request — which, like the enforcement decline, fell under the radar — is that administrative enforcement poses a threat to the constitutional rights of regulated parties and is thus in need of major reform.
In the case of the EPA, certainly, this premise is entirely false. There is simply no legitimate reason to suspect that EPA enforcement practices and procedures deny due process to any party.
OMB’s solicitation of comments is clearly designed to collect exaggerated regulatory “horror stories” from well-paid lawyers representing polluters and other scofflaws. Their claims may overstate the harm to their clients while omitting mention of relevant ameliorating factors.
Unfortunately it seems likely that President Trump’s administration will use the one-sided “data” OMB collects from industry lawyers to further decimate enforcement at the EPA and other agencies and make it practically impossible to successfully pursue more than a tiny number of administrative enforcement actions.
To the extent that comes to pass, the EPA and its sister agencies will be deprived of a much-needed and valuable enforcement tool to redress environmental pollution and other wrongdoing — and in the process, American citizens’ health, safety and well-being will suffer needless but very real damage.
Top photo by the Natural Resources Defense Council, used under a Creative Commons license.
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Joel A. Mintz | February 24, 2020
In recent months the Trump administration has intensified its assault on federal environmental safeguards on several fronts. It has proposed drastic reductions in the scope of protections against water and air pollution, lagged in the cleanup of hazardous waste contamination, allowed the continued marketing of toxic herbicides, narrowed the scope of needed environmental impact reviews, ignored and undermined legitimate scientific studies and findings, and dismantled government attempts to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.
Noah Sachs | February 19, 2020
On Monday, February 24, the Supreme Court will hear argument in U.S. Forest Service v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association and Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC v. Cowpasture River Preservation Association. These consolidated cases pit a pipeline developer and the U.S. Forest Service against environmental groups that want to halt the pipeline's construction and protect the Appalachian Trail.
Daniel Farber | February 18, 2020
The Little Ice Age wasn't actually an ice age, but it was a period of markedly colder temperatures that began in the 1200s and lasted into the mid-1800s, with the 1600s a particular low point. It was a time when London winter fairs were regularly held on the middle of a frozen Thames river, glaciers grew, and sea ice expanded. That episode of climate disruption may give us some insights into how current global warming may impact society.
Matthew Freeman | February 12, 2020
When I was a 7th grader living in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., my school system was one of many around the nation to launch a program of school busing to desegregate its schools. After 18 years, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education finally traveled a handful of miles down the road from the Supreme Court and arrived in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I was reminded of that as I listened to the latest episode of Connect the Dots, CPR’s podcast hosted by Rob Verchick, on the Juliana v. United States case
Katie Tracy | February 5, 2020
Last week, more than 100 advocates, academics, and reporters joined the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) for a webinar with three leading experts on climate migration and resilience. Presenters discussed the biggest challenges that communities and workers are facing due to the climate crisis.
James Goodwin | February 4, 2020
On Thursday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee's Environment Subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine the harm to children posed by the Trump administration's attack on one of the most wildly successful clean air protections in American history: the Obama-era Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). The rule, adopted in 2012 after literally decades in the making, has reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of brain-damaging mercury by more than 81 percent, acid gases by more than 88 percent, and sulfur dioxide by more than 44 percent. Altogether, its pollution reductions have saved thousands of lives.
Karen Sokol | January 28, 2020
On January 17, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a much-awaited decision dismissing Juliana v. United States, a climate case that gained more traction in the courts than anyone had expected, given, as U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken stated in her opinion denying the motions to dismiss in the case, it was "no ordinary lawsuit."
Joel A. Mintz | January 27, 2020
From time to time, a judicial decision from a federal court has the potential to have a profound impact on American society and government policy. Such a case is Juliana v. United States, in which a group of 21 young people, together with an environmental organization and "a representative of future generations," brought suit against numerous federal agencies and officials seeking a judicially mandated plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and a drawdown of excess atmospheric carbon.
James Goodwin | January 23, 2020
When the Trump administration released its recent proposal to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it trumpeted the action as a long-overdue step to "modernize" the law's implementation by "simplifying" and "clarifying" its procedural and analytical requirements for federal agencies. If these words sound familiar, that's because they're the disingenuous claptrap that opponents of regulatory safeguards repeatedly trot out to camouflage their efforts to rig legislative and rulemaking processes in favor of corporate polluters. Put differently, those terms might as well be conservatives' code words to describe something that will cause more trips to the emergency room for urban children who suffer from asthma, more toxic contaminants in our drinking water, more irreversible degradation of fragile wetlands, and more runaway climate change.