The Environmental Protection Agency has essentially stopped doing its job. A new watchdog report shows that civil lawsuits against polluters dropped to just 16 cases in Trump’s first year back in office. That’s a staggering 76 percent decline from Biden’s first year, and even lower than Trump’s own first term when 86 cases were filed.
Let that sink in for a moment. Sixteen cases. In an entire year. For a country with thousands of industrial facilities, chemical plants, and potential environmental violators.
The Environmental Integrity Project dug through federal court and administrative data to uncover what many suspected but now have the numbers to prove. America’s environmental laws are becoming meaningless without enforcement. You can have all the regulations in the world written down on paper, but if nobody’s checking whether companies actually follow them, what’s the point?
When the Watchdog Stops Watching
This isn’t just about fewer lawsuits. The EPA in 2025 laid off hundreds of employees whose entire job was monitoring pollution that could harm human health. Meanwhile, at least a third of lawyers in the Justice Department’s environment division have walked out the door in the past year. That’s not a staff adjustment, that’s a mass exodus of the people who know how to hold polluters accountable.
It gets worse. The EPA formalized a new “compliance first” policy last December that basically tells staff to play nice with suspected violators before taking any real action. Craig Pritzlaff, a principal deputy assistant administrator, wrote a memo saying formal enforcement should only happen when informal methods don’t work. Traditional case tools should be reserved for emergencies presenting “significant harm to human health and the environment.”
Here’s the thing about that approach. Federal agencies like the EPA don’t just enforce rules to punish individual violators. They use high-profile cases to send a message to every other company out there: we’re watching, and there are consequences. Without visible environmental cops on the beat, compliance erodes. Companies do the math and realize the risk of getting caught and actually penalized is vanishingly small.
The Texas Connection Nobody’s Talking About
Pritzlaff’s background tells you everything you need to know about where this is heading. He spent five years running enforcement for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, where Public Citizen called him a “reluctant regulator.” Under his watch, an INEOS chemical plant racked up close to 100 violations over a decade before a 2023 explosion sent a worker to the hospital and sparked a fire that burned for an hour.
The agency’s excuse? They claimed it was more efficient to let violations pile up and handle them all in one enforcement action. That’s not efficiency, that’s negligence dressed up in management speak. TCEQ eventually fined INEOS $2.3 million for violations that occurred between 2016 and 2021. Five years of violations, one fine, one explosion. That’s the model now being imported to federal environmental enforcement.
The numbers back up what common sense tells us. Through September of last year, the EPA issued $41 million in penalties. That’s $8 million less than the same period under Biden, even after adjusting for inflation. When penalties shrink and lawsuits disappear, polluters get the message loud and clear.
What This Means for Your Neighborhood
Administrative cases did actually increase during Trump’s second term, but here’s the catch. Most involved paperwork violations for risk management plans or municipalities breaking drinking water rules. The Trump administration didn’t increase administrative cases involving actual pollution from industrial operations. It’s the environmental equivalent of giving speeding tickets for expired registration while ignoring drunk drivers.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. From day one of his second term, Trump pushed an aggressive deregulatory agenda. Administrator Lee Zeldin launched what the administration called “the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history” in March, with 31 separate efforts to roll back air and water pollution restrictions. The administration wants to hand more authority to states, some of which have spent decades proving they’d rather support lax enforcement than protect public health.
Environmental advocates worry we’re watching compliance collapse in real time. Erika Kranz from Harvard Law School points out that this decline in enforcement is just another mechanism the administration is using to sideline environmental and public health protections. If you’re worried about the air your kids breathe or the water coming out of your tap, this trend should keep you up at night.
The report acknowledges that many court cases last longer than a year, so we’re still in early days of understanding the full scope. But the trajectory is clear and steep. Historically, administrations have broad discretion in making enforcement decisions. But this sharp of a drop might cross the line from exercising discretion to abandoning core statutory duties.
Legal challenges could be coming. Groups might argue this goes beyond prioritization and becomes an abdication of the EPA’s fundamental mission. Whether courts will agree remains to be seen, but the question itself reveals how far we’ve drifted from the basic principle that environmental laws should actually be enforced. When the agency tasked with protecting the environment stops holding polluters accountable, you have to wonder what exactly we’re protecting anymore.
