The EPA’s retreat from its role guarding clean air and water
will have lasting effects on public health, critics fear.
The Trump EPA Is a Toothless Friend of
Polluting Industries, Analysis Shows
Peter Aldhous / Inside Climate News
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/01092026/trump-epa-clean-air-water-retreat/
(September 1, 2026) — By its own account, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is doing a fantastic job. In a March reporton its performance in the last fiscal year, the agency boasted that it had concluded 2,127 civil enforcement cases, “the highest in nine years.”
That number wasn’t wrong, but it was very misleading, an Inside Climate News analysis of EPA data reveals.
For starters, the 2025 fiscal year included the last three-and-a-half months of Joe Biden’s presidency. Comparing years beginning on Jan. 20 casts the current EPA’s record in a much less forgiving light. New lawsuits filed against the most egregious polluters—one of the strongest weapons in the EPA’s enforcement arsenal—have fallen off a cliff under the second Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the EPA has shifted how it approaches the administrative orders that comprise the vast bulk of its enforcement. It’s imposing fewer monetary penalties in favor of orders that merely require offenders to clean up their act.
Those compliance orders are now dominated by small-scale actions against public water systems, slapping officials on the wrist for failing to file inventories of and inform customers about water service lines made of lead.
While it’s important to address potential contamination of drinking water with a potent neurotoxin, these orders represent an administrative checkpoint in a much longer process of pipe replacement mandated by the Biden administration. They are a far cry from tough action against violators in the oil and gas industry and other major pollutersand have allowed President Donald Trump’s EPA to pad its numbers with activities that impose little cost on offenders.
“From the beginning this administration particularly has been on a focused effort to dismantle environmental protection,” said Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under Republican President George W. Bush and is now co-chair of the centrist Forward Party. “Very early on, they got rid of a lot of the enforcement officers and compliance officers so there’s no one there to truly enforce the way they have in the past.”
Indeed, an Inside Climate News analysis of federal employment data shows that, by the end of June, the EPA had lost more than a quarter of its workforce since Trump returned to office. Legal and related occupations, including staff responsible for compliance and enforcement, experienced a similar sharp drop.
Inside Climate News shared its findings with the EPA. The agency indicated that it would respond, asking for a deadline extension. After more than 10 days of delay, however, the EPA failed to comment and stopped responding to emails.
Aside from relatively rare criminal prosecutions, civil lawsuits are the strongest way for the EPA to enforce the nation’s environmental laws. They have always been a minority of the agency’s enforcement actions but have included some of the highest-profile cases and account for a vastly disproportionate share of financial penalties imposed on polluters.
Famous examples include the EPA’s lawsuit against BP for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to an unprecedented $5.5 billion federal penalty, and criminal and civil penalties of $4.3 billion against Volkswagen under for installing “defeat devices” designed to cheat on federal emissions tests in diesel vehicles manufactured between 2009 and 2016—including $1.5 billion to settle the EPA’s civil lawsuit.
The Inside Climate News analysis of data from the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online system shows that the filing of civil lawsuits on behalf of the EPA has been in a long decline ever since the red-wave 2010 midterm elections during President Barack Obama’s first administration. Even so, the dramatic falloff in new civil suits filed in the EPA’s name by the second Trump administration is unprecedented.
Since the 2010 midterms, Republicans in Congress have targeted the EPA for cuts. The agency’s staffing has fallen, setting in play an enforcement decline that continued even through the Biden administration.
“It’s a difficult ship to turn around once it’s headed in an anti-enforcement direction,” said Christopher Sellers, an environmental historian at Stony Brook University and lead author of a February report from the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative that similarly found a “historic dive” in EPA enforcement under the second Trump administration.
Both the long-term decline in civil lawsuits and the collapse under the current administration reflect changes at the Department of Justice as well as at the EPA itself, since the agency must collaborate with DOJ attorneys to bring civil cases to federal court.
As Inside Climate News has reported, the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division has been devastated under the second Trump administration. It has lost a significant chunk of its workforce since Trump returned to office and has been recast as the Energy and Natural Resources Division, given a remit of “unleashing American energy.”
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