EPA’s Top Lawman Calls on Trump to Keep Enforcement Tough

The law professor who became the Biden administration’s top environmental cop has a warning for President-elect Donald Trump: going soft on enforcement will force the EPA to make hard choices about which communities deserve to be safeguarded and which don’t.

“For whom are you going to cut environmental protection?” David Uhlmann, the recently departed chief of the EPA’s enforcement section, said in an interview. “Which environmental protections are you going to eliminate? Are you going to say that not everybody needs to have safe drinking water?”

High-profile cases of contamination and pollution such as the water crisis in Flint, Mich., ...