These enforcement actions represent some of the best work EPA and the Justice Department have done in the past decade. Not surprisingly, these relentless attacks have taken a toll over the last two decades.Ĭivil and criminal cases involving six defendants – BP, Transocean, Duke Energy, Volkswagen, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler – netted a combined total of nearly $12.5 billion in penalties and $31.5 billion for cleanup costs (see Table 3 of the report). On his first day in office, President Biden signed an Executive Order pledging to, “hold polluters accountable, including those who disproportionately harm communities of color and low-income communities.” To keep that promise, the Biden Administration will have to rebuild an EPA enforcement program battered by budget cuts, worn down by the polluter-friendly policies of the last Administration, and undermined by “states’ rights” advocates hostile to federal enforcement of federal environmental laws. David Uhlmann, nominated to lead EPA’s enforcement program on June 22, 2021, is still awaiting confirmation from a gridlocked Senate nearly eight months later.
The Biden Administration has requested modest increase in staff levels for fiscal year 2022, but a Congress limping from one continuing resolution to the next may not approve it. It should not be surprising, however, given that EPA has lost nearly 700 enforcement staff over the past decade, about 22 percent of its workforce. While it is not unusual for results to vary from one year to the next, the long-term decline in almost every measure of enforcement outputs is troubling. “While the last four years saw new lows, EPA enforcement’s decline really began in the second term of the Obama Administration when the budget ax fell hard on EPA.” That is a wake-up call the Biden Administration needs to answer before it is too late,” said Eric Schaeffer, Executive Director of the Environmental Integrity Project and former Director of Civil Enforcement at EPA. “From a long-term perspective based on twenty years of data, almost every measure of performance – inspections, criminal investigations, civil cases referred to or concluded by the Justice Department, criminal defendants charged, civil penalties or criminal fines paid, cleanup costs recovered from polluters – points to a serious decline in EPA’s capacity to enforce our environmental laws.
There are some encouraging signs among the results reported for the latest fiscal year, which ended on September 30, 2021. Civil penalties ($160 million) and injunctive relief ($8.47 billion) were closer to the norm for that year when adjusted for inflation and unusually large outlier cases (like the Volkswagen emissions settlement) are excluded.īut the 114 cases referred by EPA to the Justice Department for civil prosecutions in the year ending on September 30 remained less than half the annual average between 2002-2017 while the 1,587 civil cases that were successfully concluded fell to the lowest level during the 20-year period analyzed here. The number of criminal cases opened (123) and polluters charged (105) in the 2021 federal fiscal year were at their second lowest levels in the past two decades, while fines and years of incarceration were at their lowest. Adjusted for inflation and comparing average annual results, civil penalties in 2018-2021 were at least 28 percent lower than during 2002-2017, while criminal fines declined 49 percent. The amounts paid by polluters also hit new lows. – Recently released Environmental Protection Agency enforcement data show that between the 20 fiscal years, the number of inspections, criminal investigations, and civil and criminal prosecutions all declined by around half compared to the average yearly totals between 20.
#E.P.A. APPROVED DECADE AGO NEW FILES FULL#
Inspections, Investigations, Prosecutions Down by Half Since 2002 Biden Administration Needs to Reverse Trendĭownload our report for a full analysis and our spreadsheet for a year-by-year review of the data.
(202) New EPA Enforcement Data Show Decade-Long Decline Sped-Up During Trump Era
0 kommentar(er)
