Former EPA Enforcement Boss Blasts Agency’s Approach Under Trump

A top former EPA official under President Joe Biden painted a stark picture Thursday of how he sees the Trump administration enforcing environmental laws.

Broadly, the data suggests the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement activity in 2025 will be “historically low,” David Uhlmann, who led the agency’s enforcement program, said during an American Bar Association meeting.

He acknowledged “elections have consequences, and new administrations are entitled to pursue their policy initiatives.” But policy differences shouldn’t affect whether the EPA is focused on addressing the worst pollution across the nation and ensuring clean air and safe water for American citizens, said Uhlmann, now a partner at Marten Law and a visiting professor at the George Washington University Law School.

“Nor should energy production—or any other sector—receive favorable treatment, particularly when doing so risks undermining EPA’s efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change,” he said.

Top EPA officials, including Administrator Lee Zeldin and Jeffrey Hall—the White House’s nominee to replace Uhlmann—have repeatedly said they will aggressively go after polluters.

But Uhlmann said “we should not expect much. While I think we may see some normalcy in the enforcement area—and we certainly did during the first Trump administration—it is hard to see a strong enforcement program emerging from an administration that is so malleable regarding the rule of law, so willing to favor specific industries, and so determined to unravel the public health and environmental protections provided by EPA.”

The EPA is still conducting some enforcement activity, especially in its regional offices. But those levels are sure to drop because so many EPA employees have left or been driven out of the agency, Uhlmann said.

He further said he “would not be surprised to see this EPA insist that it must curtail its use of administrative enforcement” in compliance with the Supreme Court’s 2024 SEC v. Jarkesy decision. In that case, the high court found that a defendant who faced enforcement from an SEC administrative law judge over securities fraud was entitled to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment.

Tom Mariani, a former official at the Department of Justice’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division, said during the same meeting that he expects the Trump EPA to take a tough enforcement stance on Superfund cleanups, lead abatements, and environmental crimes.

“You’re still seeing cases pursued across a range of things,” Mariani said in reference to criminal cases. “You’re going to see that continue, and I haven’t seen any situations in which the department decided to pull criminal prosecutions.”

The EPA recently said it would stop focusing enforcement resources on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, stop focusing on facilities that handle hydrogen fluoride, and stop focusing its air toxics enforcement exclusively on communities deemed to be already highly burdened by pollution, according to an internal agency memo.

The White House’s fiscal 2026 budget request seeks to cut the EPA’s civil enforcement budget by 30.4% and its criminal enforcement budget by 49.2%.

“That’s a big cut,” Mariani said. “That’s going to make a difference.”

Hall told a Senate committee during his confirmation hearing that he wants to advance President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda, empower the states to make their own decisions, and ensure good actors aren’t unduly punished.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is scheduled to vote on Hall’s nomination Sept. 17.