"The EPA’s retreat from its role guarding clean air and water will have lasting effects on public health, critics fear."
"By its own account, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is doing a fantastic job. In a March report on 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."
Peter Aldhous reports for Inside Climate News September 1, 2026.
