EPA Touts Winning Record, but Some Attorneys Dispute Its Numbers

The EPA’s top lawyer is trumpeting the agency’s success rate in court, saying it’s won two-thirds of “significant” environmental cases during the Trump administration.

But the assertion, made by the agency’s general counsel, Matthew Z. Leopold, in an Aug. 10 opinion piece in Bloomberg Law, clashes with—and also comes in response to—other tallies showing judges have largely sided with the EPA’s state and environmental adversaries.

Leopold said his goal was to “set the record straight,” showing the Environmental Protection Agency’s success rate on defensive litigation is much higher than outside scorecards suggest. Those trackers interpret court decisions ...