DOJ Legal Delays Slow Environmental Cases and Frustrate Lawyers

Staff shortages, turnover, and new priorities at the Department of Justice are stretching legal staff handling environmental issues and causing unusual delays—even before the government shutdown.

President Donald Trump’s moves to overhaul the federal workforce and realign environmental policies toward business-friendly approaches are delaying lawsuits, consent decrees, and other legal work, according to private sector attorneys. The delays are affecting cases involving climate change, air pollution, and other traditional environmental litigation, as well as Trump’s priorities, they say.

“Settlements in the environmental arena have slowed down,” said Heidi Friedman, a partner and co-chair of Thompson Hine LLP’s corporate sustainability practice.

Whether the delays are due to staff cuts or personnel focusing on the administration’s priorities isn’t clear, she said.

Whatever the reason, delays have consequences, said Mark Miller, director of environment and natural resources litigation at the Pacific Legal Foundation, referring to his experiences with property rights litigation.

“Businesses are up against the clock to succeed,” Miller said. “If they can’t use their properties, it can overwhelm their ability to litigate.”

New cases aren’t proceeding, and existing cases are stalled because the agency is understaffed and has lost institutional knowledge, said a former DOJ official who requested anonymity because his firm is involved in active government cases.

Extension requests are common in a new administration, but the current delays are far more harmful, the former official said.

The DOJ declined to comment.

Staff Cuts

At least a third of senior career leaders have left the department in Trump’s second term, taking with them centuries of combined expertise, a Bloomberg Law analysis shows.

Some of the positions would be among the cuts proposed in the agency’s 2026 budget request, which seeks $90 million for DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD), a 22.5% drop from fiscal 2025. The budget also seeks a 31% reduction in division staff, from 641 to 449. The cuts would include 79 attorneys.

The department requested a $49 million boost for its Civil Division, which also defends the government in some environmental cases. But there too, it aims to cut 129 attorneys compared to fiscal 2025.

Former ENRD and Environmental Protection Agency officials spoke about such cuts during an American Bar Association conference in September.

DOJ’s environmental defense section has gone from about 120 lawyers in February to between 65 and 70, said Tom Mariani, the group’s former head.

“They were struggling at 120,” said David Uhlmann, who worked with ENRD when he led the EPA‘s enforcement unit under President Joe Biden, at the conference. “I can’t imagine how they’ll manage with 65-70.”

The staff remaining will do a great job, but it’s going to be harder and may affect representation quality, said Neal McAliley, a shareholder in Carlton Fields PA who spent 10 years at ENRD before leaving in 2002.

Stretched Thin

Some motions filed by DOJ attorneys show they’re stretched.

“I have seen extensions of time that have been filed by the government saying something like ‘we are under-resourced and so we need more time to reply,’” said Andrew Mergen, faculty director of an environmental law and policy clinic managed by Harvard Law School.

In June, the DOJ shared workload details as it sought more time to file documents in a case about the administration freezing approved funds for energy projects, Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council v. USDA.

The extension “is necessary in light of government counsel’s other appellate deadlines,” it told the court, providing a two-page list of other cases on which the attorneys assigned to Woonasquatucket were working.

In another case, Sierra Club v. EPA, an assistant US attorney said: “Defendants respectfully state that they do not currently have the resources to prepare a responsive pleading for this matter concurrent with their opposition to plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction.”

Negotiations over government payment of cost recovery claims stemming from the military’s per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) releases have slowed in In Re Aqueous Film-Forming Foams Products Liability Litigation MDL 2873 before the US District Court for the District of South Carolina.

“I know y’all are frustrated” by the delays, said Judge Richard M. Gergel during a June status conference. “About half the DOJ lawyers have either left or moved on to other departments. So everybody’s facing this when litigating against DOJ.”

The PFAS litigation is one of many lawsuits now paused during the shutdown. The US has also requested a pause in Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council.

Consent decrees for contaminated site cleanups are also slowed, Thompson Hine’s Friedman said.

Previously, once the DOJ, EPA, and a client negotiated a cleanup plan it would take two or three weeks for senior leadership to sign off, she said. By contrast, it took nearly five months to get the required signature for a recent consent decree, Friedman said.

Defending Trump’s Agenda

Delays can help parties that need more time to strategize, but sometimes companies don’t want to get stuck in cases, the former DOJ official said.

Cases where property rights have been violated over interpretations of the Clean Water Act that came before a pivotal Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA, for example, aren’t being resolved, Miller said. Allowing those cases to move forward would seem to align with the administration’s priorities, he said.

In April, Trump directed agencies to repeal regulations inconsistent with Sackett, which found wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act only if they directly abut navigable waterways.

Half a dozen pending cases have stalled, because the DOJ says it needs to wait for EPA to propose a rule clarifying the definition of “waters of the United States,” Miller said.

The EPA sent its proposed rule to the White House for review and indicated it plans to issue the regulation this fall.

“The delays are harming our clients, and we think they should be resolved quickly,” Miller said.