The Quiet Way Trump Has Made Life Easier for Polluters

While attention has focused on Trump’s most splashy, explicit environmental policies—for instance, the administration’s proud evisceration of environmental protections such as auto fuel standards, oil drilling limits, and the “endangerment finding” underlying emissions regulations—a recent report shows the administration is also overhauling environmental policy in a quieter way: The Environmental Protection Agency is radically reducing enforcement of many environmental laws still on the books. Trump’s EPA, the report reveals, is overseeing a “historic” decline in enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws.

According to the report, which was released by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI, last month, the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database, known as ECHO, shows major declines in enforcement, posing threats to the environment and public health. 

Compared with the final year under President Biden, the first year of Trump 2.0 produced a 40 percent plunge in lead paint hazard inspections, a 36 percent decline in toxic substances inspections, a 29 percent drop in average federal penalties for complaints filed, and a 29 percent increase in cases involving zero penalty for violators.

These are not mere bureaucratic slippages, the report makes clear: Among some of the EPA’s “most important enforcement responsibilities”—such as inspections of hazardous waste, toxic substances, and air pollution—Trump’s EPA enforcement “is the worst of any administration in the last 20 years.”

The agenda behind Trump’s epic rollback of environmental enforcement amounts to “Let’s inspect less, let’s enforce less, let’s fine less,” says report co-author Christopher Sellers, professor of history at SUNY Stonybrook in New York. “It’s all about making polluters’ savings great again.”

The enforcement plunge is effectively erasing environmental protection, Sellers told me: “The whole idea of creating the EPA is that you need laws and ways of penalizing people if they don’t obey the laws. If you aren’t enforcing the laws, it’s like they’re not there.”

When I asked the EPA about the EDGI report and Sellers’s assessment, press secretary Carolyn Holran responded with an email saying, “EPA will be publishing annual enforcement and compliance numbers in the near future. Suffice to say, they will upset narratives being peddled by left-wing climate cultists and show the Trump EPA is enforcing the law and carrying out its core statutory responsibilities of protecting human health and the environment like never before.”

But the EPA’s own data shows a dramatically different trajectory. Inspections for drinking water fell by 15 percent in 2025, while inspections of air pollution and waste declined by 14 percent and water pollution by 5 percent, according to EDGI’s research of EPA data. Enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act is “way down,” Sellers notes. Penalties for violations have plummeted, the number of violations involving zero fines have shot up, and inspections are down.

Buttressing EDGI’s report is similar analysis from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, which found the EPA has nearly halted actions against major polluters. EPA enforcement “is dying on the vine, and that’s intentional,” PEER executive director and former EPA attorney Tim Whitehouse told The Guardian in February. An unnamed current EPA employee also confirmed to The Guardian that PEER’s findings were consistent with what they were observing internally.

This sweeping deregulatory push exacerbates a longer-term “retreat of EPA from enforcement” in recent decades, according to EDGI—an “accelerating decline” that “augurs deepening dangers to Americans’ health and mounting damage to their communities and environments in the years ahead.”

One major area of enforcement decline involves the EPA’s rapidly fading use of the courts and judicial action to compel compliance with environmental protections. This plunge in EPA court action means less enforcement against particularly egregious environmental violators who are less compliance-minded, Sellers explains.

In 2025, Trump’s EPA “launched fewer civil judicial cases than any other administration in the past 20 years,” EDGI found—just one-third of what the Biden administration initiated in 2024. The Trump EPA has overseen a 66 percent shriveling in judicial cases filed and a 46 percent decline in cases concluded, EDGI found.

In this “historic retreat from the courtroom,” the report argues, EPA is initiating and concluding dramatically fewer cases against “the worst environmental violators.” It’s a huge shift even from prior Republican administrations. When the G.W. Bush EPA announced a “similar commitment” to deregulation in the early 2000s, the report notes, “it was taking polluters to court 20 times more often” than Trump has.     

Trump’s industry-cozy EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has radically reduced the agency’s role as a protector of the environment and public health through deep staffing cuts and a complete reorientation of the EPA’s role and priorities. Zeldin initiated the staff cuts in July, promising to slash the agency workforce from 16,155 to 12,448, a gutting of more than 20 percent. In a statement reported by The Hill, Center for Biological Diversity attorney Ivan Ditmars noted, “Without the scientists and researchers to maintain strong health and environmental standards, polluters will profit while the rest of us suffer from dirtier air and water. As Trump stops policing pollution, we can expect more asthma attacks, lead contamination and all the other harms that EPA experts strive to prevent.”

In a March 12 memo announcing “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” Zeldin unveiled his onslaught on environmental protection and the Zeldin EPA’s priority of “unleashing American energy.” This policy overhaul included a “compliance first” approach that has significantly curtailed the enforcement actions, inspections, and penalties that longtime EPA regulators say are crucial to delivering on-the-ground compliance.

Gary Jonesi, who worked at EPA from 1985 until Trump’s second election, says this approach gets it backward. “Compliance is the end goal, but enforcement is the tool to get us there,” he told me. Enforcement “needs to be unencumbered and unrestrained.” With greatly diminished staffing and “exceedingly little” enforcement by EPA, Jonesi notes, “now rule of law means they’re going to rein in enforcement at EPA, not go after polluters.”

In response to my questions about its dwindling staff, the EPA press secretary claimed in an email the agency has “transformed its workforce” to be “best positioned to fulfill its statutory obligations, protect human health and the environment, Power the Great American Comeback, be an exceptional steward of taxpayer resources, and continue to make all decisions based on gold-standard science.” The agency says it is “doing more with less and we are confident we have the resources needed to accomplish these goals and our core mission.”

But there is ample reason to worry that the EPA is enabling more pollution and violations. In the current deregulatory climate, Jonesi points out, EPA staff “self-censor” because they know “anything to do with fossil fuels that could harm or endanger someone” won’t be enforced. As Sellers points out, “This is an EPA that has exempted whole categories of polluters from having to comply if they write a letter.”  Indeed, the EPA announced a special electronic mailbox “to allow the regulated community to request a Presidential Exemption under section 112(i)(4) of the Clean Air Act.”

In at least one case, the EPA in June dropped an enforcement action against a major Trump donor, alleging more than 1,100 violations involving the misuse of disinfectants at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in California, ProPublica reported. The GEO Group, which donated a whopping $3.7 million to Trump and other Republicans in 2024, also had previously retained Pam Bondi, now attorney general, as a registered lobbyist.

Jonesi, who retired four days after Trump’s inauguration and quickly launched a clean-energy advocacy group called CREEDemocracy, worries about major lapses in enforcing laws on lead paint hazards, as well as longer-term pollution threats from fossil fuels. “It’s particularly disheartening seeing seasoned agency people leaving and offices being shuttered,” he says.