EPA Touts Environmental Enforcement It Says Surpasses Biden (1)

The EPA under President Donald Trump notched higher enforcement numbers across several key metrics in fiscal 2025 than it has in a decade, Jeffrey Hall, head of the agency’s enforcement division, said in an interview.

The numbers will come as a surprise to many of the administration’s critics, who say Trump has given a free pass to industry and remember how enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency dropped sharply in the president’s first term.

“They have a preconceived narrative,” Hall said of the agency’s critics. “They continue to be boxed in and think that it’s impossible to achieve economic growth—what we consider powering the Great American Comeback—while also enforcing the law and achieving compliance with it.”

It’s essentially the same argument the EPA has made in the past under Republican leadership, such as President George W. Bush: unless the agency enforces the law vigorously, scofflaws and foreign competitors will get an unfair advantage and weaken the economy.

This largely explains why the EPA, during Trump’s first year of his second term, concluded 2,127 civil enforcement cases, the most in nine years, according to data provided by the agency.

Other areas of improvement included the execution of more than 14,000 compliance monitoring activities and 8,300 inspections. The EPA said those results were, respectively, the second highest in the last decade and the second highest in the last eight years.

The EPA also said it assessed more than $1.2 billion in civil penalties and criminal fines, restitution, and other court-ordered relief; charged 156 defendants and obtained 65 years of incarceration; secured more than $6.4 billion in commitments to bring facilities back into compliance; finalized 52 Superfund enforcement instruments valued at more than $758 million; and received 538 voluntary disclosures of new owner audit agreements, covering violations at 957 facilities.

Hall said the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance under his leadership is “looking to focus on clear violations and achieving compliance as quickly as possible.”

The EPA rolled out a new policy in early December directing staff to “prioritize ensuring compliance when addressing potential noncompliance” with federal laws, according to an internal memo dated Dec. 5 and reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

The goal is to bring entities in compliance in the fastest, most economical way possible that is also the most consistent with the law, Hall said.

“That is a different philosophy than the idea of overly penalizing industry and caring most about the penalties that we can assess, or trying to achieve regulation by enforcement,” he said.

It’s still too soon to be able to measure results from the compliance-first doctrine, but Hall said it’s working. Tricky legal questions are being raised early so they can be resolved quickly and consistently across cases, and communities are seeing faster environmental benefits in the form of violations being fixed faster, he said.

Shift Under Trump

The results are especially surprising because EPA enforcement fell sharply during Trump’s first term, according to outside analysis. The Environmental Integrity Project issued a report finding dramatic drops across the board between 2018 and 2021, including fewer inspections, fewer criminal investigations, and fewer civil and criminal prosecutions.

The current Trump administration has drawn criticism for appearing lax with industrial violators and prioritizing economic gains over environmental protection.

Cynthia Giles, who led EPA’s enforcement team under President Barack Obama, in a January interview slammed the compliance-first approach, saying “violators in the oil and gas industry, chemical plants, refineries, and other large facilities don’t need help from EPA to figure out how to comply. They know what to do. What EPA supplies through enforcement is motivation to actually do it.”

In Giles’ view, the focus on compliance “helps violators, not the communities that are harmed.”

Separately, the EPA stopped focusing on communities historically overburdened by pollution through environmental justice as an enforcement priority shortly after Trump took office. Under former President Joe Biden, environmental justice was woven into all of the agency’s national enforcement initiatives.

Hall said OECA’s goal “has been to ensure that there is clean air, land, and water for every American.” He further questioned how effective the Biden-era focus on environmental justice
was.

“I think that was more window dressing than anything else,” he said. “I don’t ever think it achieved ‘environmental justice,’ in quotation marks.”

Looking ahead, Hall said the EPA will focus increasingly on enforcing imports at the nation’s ports and borders. One reason for that emphasis is that it’s a type of enforcement that the federal government, rather than the states, is best poised to do, he said.

The EPA in fiscal 2025 blocked over 1.6 million pounds of illegal pesticides from entering the nation, the agency said Monday.

Critics Remain Dubious

In recent months, several environmental groups have issued their own sets of findings, broadly critiquing what they say is a lack of enforcement action.

For example, the Environmental Integrity Project issued a report in February finding a “dramatic collapse” in EPA enforcement during the first year of Trump’s second term. EIP cited a 76% drop in civil lawsuits filed against polluters compared to the first year of the Biden administration.

Similarly, Giles did her own analysis of the EPA’s online enforcement data and found the Biden administration is responsible for 93% of the total fiscal 2025 civil penalties and civil injunctive relief, as well as 97% of the judicial injunctive relief and 99% of the judicial civil penalties.

“This is not a success story for the Trump EPA,” Giles said in an email Monday, referring to the EPA’s newest data. “The results show great civil enforcement work by the Biden EPA and practically nothing by Trump. They are trying to rehabilitate their dismal enforcement image with this report. Don’t believe it.”

“The days of using EPA’s enforcement arm to pursue overzealous prosecution and partisan agendas are over,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement Monday. “The Trump EPA is bringing common sense and the rule of law back to environmental enforcement and compliance.”