Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head, Scott Pruitt, has found another way to gut the agency’s mission. Deriding the EPA’s practice of settling lawsuits brought by environmental groups trying to get it to enforce its own rules as “Sue & Settle,” Pruitt said the EPA wouldn’t be doing that anymore.
The rule change could force environmental groups to spend much more time and effort on lawsuits aimed at making the EPA enforce its own rules and abide by agreed-upon timelines—spreading them thinner and making it harder for them to expend effort on other, more complicated cases. The EPA’s decision to refuse to reimburse lawyers’ fees also could be costly to environmental groups, as well as make it harder and less likely for average citizens and localities to undertake lawsuits to get the EPA to do what it’s legally required to do. [...]
The new memorandum formalizes a position of fighting every lawsuit tooth-and-nail that Pruitt had announced early in his tenure at the EPA. Back in February, he’d promised he wouldn’t allow “regulation through litigation.” The Justice Department also has stopped negotiating settlements that end up with payments to outside groups to cover attorneys’ or other fees.
In short, if you want the government to follow the rules, you had better have great lawyers and deep pockets, because you’re going to court. The Sierra Club fired back:
“Scott Pruitt and his polluter cronies continue to perpetrate lies about the law as an excuse for refusing enforcing it — but when it comes to the law, the truth has a way of catching up with you,” Sierra Club Environmental Law Program Director Pat Gallagher said in a statement. “If Pruitt thinks that by frivolously litigating deadline cases he will deter the Sierra Club or other citizen groups from holding him accountable in court, he should think again – we will not be deterred.”
But unless its donors step up in a big way—huge—even the Sierra Club is going to end up finding its resources strained in the fight to keep the Trump EPA from turning into the EDA (Environmental Destruction Agency).