With the congressional majority continuing to gut enforcement budgets, forcing federal environmental and workplace safety agencies to cut staff, criminal prosecution of corporate bad actors is more important than ever. That's the thrust of Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Rena Steinzor's commentary in the May/June issue of The Environmental Forum, the policy journal of the Environmental Law Institute.
As Steinzor notes in the piece:
The BP oil spill and Volkswagen emissions cheating scandals, by their size and audacity, should motivate significant changes in the approach to criminal environmental enforcement, and if those changes make the federal Department of Justice more aggressive, they will come just in time, because EPA and the states’ routine civil enforcement is arguably in worse shape than at any time since the agency was created 46 years ago. EPA has endured a decade of deep budget cuts and endless bureaucracy bashing. In constant dollars, EPA has less to spend than at any time since the 1990s, when it began to implement the latest Clean Air Act Amendments. Last year, it announced a 30 percent cut in routine inspections and a 23 percent reduction in civil enforcement actions. Most of the states delegated to implement regulatory programs are in at least as dire shape.
Predictably, industry interests are none too pleased with the renewed focus on prosecuting corporate crimes and holding executives accountable for their companies' irresponsible actions:
DOJ’s toughening stance seems to have accelerated the momentum of conservative efforts on Capitol Hill to weaken the laws that apply to so-called “regulatory crimes,” shoving health, safety, and environmental criminal enforcement into the powerful cross-currents of an election year. Leading the charge for making it tougher to prosecute white collar crimes in the health, safety, and environmental arenas are the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Koch Industries.
Steinzor explores that cynical push to fold corporate crimes into an overall criminal justice reform bill in another commentary, which was published in the Spring edition of The American Prospect.
Alongside Steinzor's in-depth Environmental Forum column, commentators from the DOJ, a legal defense firm, and the oil and gas industry's American Petroleum Institute offer their views on addressing environmental and workplace safety crimes.
You can read Steinzor's Environmental Forum piece here, and The American Prospect piece here.
The full text of "Time for Environmental Crimes" is provided courtesy of the Environmental Law Institute, © 2016.
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Brian Gumm | May 20, 2016
With the congressional majority continuing to gut enforcement budgets, forcing federal environmental and workplace safety agencies to cut staff, criminal prosecution of corporate bad actors is more important than ever. That’s the thrust of Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Rena Steinzor’s commentary in the May/June issue of The Environmental Forum, the policy journal of […]
Katie Tracy | May 19, 2016
Back in March, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finalized its long-awaited silica standard, requiring employers to reduce workers’ exposure to the toxic, cancer-causing dust so common to construction and fracking sites, among other workplaces. OSHA estimates that the new standard will prevent more than 600 deaths and 900 new cases of silicosis annually. […]
Evan Isaacson | May 18, 2016
Clean water: We can't take it for granted, as the people of Flint, Michigan, can attest. And they're not alone. In too many communities across the nation, drinking water fails to meet minimum safety standards, forcing consumers to buy bottled water and avoid the stuff coming out of their taps. We cannot say that we […]
James Goodwin | May 17, 2016
The growing problem of economic inequality in the United States continues to draw significant attention – and for good reason. By 2011, America’s top 1 percent owned more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and ours ranks as one of the most unequal economies among developed countries. Meanwhile, the median wage rate for workers […]
Rena Steinzor | May 13, 2016
Originally published on RegBlog by CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor. Rulemaking has slowed to a crawl throughout the executive branch. If an agency does not have a statutory mandate to undertake such a brutal and resource-intensive process, the choice to accomplish its mission through any other means will be tempting. Of course, if the policy issues are […]
Mollie Rosenzweig | May 12, 2016
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently launched a criminal investigation of Dole Food Company, continuing a trend of criminal enforcement against those responsible for deadly food safety lapses. The investigation stems from a Listeria outbreak in bagged salad that sickened 33 people, four of whom died. Between September 2015 and January 2016, 33 people […]
Katie Tracy | May 11, 2016
Can you imagine working for a boss who refuses you the dignity of taking a bathroom break? According to a revealing new report published today by Oxfam America, denial of bathroom breaks is a very real practice at poultry plants across the country, and line workers at these plants often “wait inordinately long times (an […]
Evan Isaacson | May 10, 2016
In the world of watershed restoration, there are multiple tools and tactics that government agencies, private landowners, and industry can use to reduce pollution and clean up our waterways. In Maryland, two of those approaches seem destined to collide. On the first track is nutrient trading, a least-cost pollution control concept predicated on the idea […]
James Goodwin | May 9, 2016
These days, it seems a week doesn’t go by without some conservative advocacy group releasing a new study that purports to measure the total annual costs of federal regulation. In this case, it’s literally true. Last week, the reliably anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) put out its annual tally, provocatively titled “Ten Thousand Commandments,” which […]