When Trump put Pruitt in charge of the EPA, the expectation was that the agency wouldn’t protect the public and environment nearly as vigorously as it has before. When Wheeler took over for Pruitt, odds that a former coal lobbyist would be tough on the industry dropped further. People worried that the EPA would step back from enforcing the rules protecting the public from pollution.
And, no surprise, it looks like that’s exactly what has happened.
Last week, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) released a report based on examinations of records and dozens of interviews with EPA staff and recent retirees. The report found “steep declines” in enforcement actions, a 22 percent decrease in court orders to reduce pollution, a 42 percent decrease in administrative orders, and a 54 perfect decreases in orders requiring polluters to pay for clean up.
What’s more, the EPA has issued 54 percent fewer fines, while the whole range of enforcement actions are at the lowest levels of at least the past decade. And while some enforcement actions have been getting slightly less common over the past decade, the recent drop is much more precipitous. Between 2008 and 2017, for example, fines declined by 6 percent, but between ‘17 and ‘18 fiscal years, they dropped by 54 percent.
While most years going back to 2010 saw at least a hundred criminal enforcement actions, that number dropped to just 54 in fiscal year 2018.
In dollar figures, lax enforcement is doing what it’s likely intended to do: saving polluters money. 2018 saw the lowest levels of federal civil judicial penalties since 2006, with corporations paying $28 million, compared to $62 million in 2014. Between 2006 and 2016, companies spent an average of $10 billion per year on complying with regulations, a figure that dropped to just $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2018.
EPA’s staff, interviewed by EDGI, admit that Trump’s deregulatory agenda plays a key role, as do the industry ties of key leaders and industry influence at the White House, the threat of budget cuts and firings, uncertainty about which rules to enforce and which are getting rolled back, and the deference to “cooperative federalism,” that leaves enforcement in state hands.
Importantly, the report shows that while Andrew Wheeler may not be as headline-grabbing as Scott Pruitt, his agenda is essentially the same.
We’ve had our suspicions that this would be the case, and knew that it was likely that the EPA wouldn’t be holding polluters to account while being led by someone who until recently worked for polluters.
But EDGI provides numbers. And unlike the Trump administration, at seemingly every level, numbers don’t lie.
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