Federal Environmental Law Enforcement Essentially Stopped; 1 Clean Air Action Last Year, 4 Clean Water Actions By EPA
Enforcement of environmental laws against major polluters has virtually ground to a halt under the Trump administration, a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records from January 2025 to January 2026 shows. Major polluters typically include companies that are among the largest in the oil, gas, coal and chemical industries.
Records show the EPA filed just one Clean Air Act consent decree compared with 26 in the first year of Trump’s first term, and 22 during Biden’s first year. Consent decrees are the legal mechanism by which the agency and US Department of Justice enforce environmental laws against major polluters. The agency appears to have similarly slowed enforcement of Superfund laws, which cover the cleanup at the nation’s most polluted sites. It filed just seven consent decrees, down from 31 under the first Trump administration.
The number of Clean Water Act enforcement actions has also dramatically declined from a peak of 18 during Biden’s first year, to four during the second Trump administration, the analysis by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit found. The EPA’s enforcement program “is dying on the vine, and that’s intentional”, said Tim Whitehouse, Peer’s executive director and a former EPA attorney. “Without an adequate enforcement program that provides deterrence to polluters, the laws become voluntary, and when laws become voluntary many companies choose to ignore them because they know there are no consequences,” Whitehouse said. “That means more pollution for communities near the facilities and more profits or the polluters.”
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Meanwhile, the Trump administration has at times effectively paused enforcement action against the energy industry. A 12 March EPA memo stated that enforcement actions will no longer “shut down any stage of energy production”. At the same time, staffing levels in the enforcement division are down by as much as 30% in some regions, the employee estimated, while the number of justice department environmental division attorneys is down by about 50%. The sum of these issues creates a “broad chilling effect” on enforcement, the employee said. Investigators are afraid to take bold action and try to not attract political appointees’ attention, they said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/13/environmental-laws-enforcement-polluters
