Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin speaking at EPA headquarters in 2025. Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images North America
A report from the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) says the EPA under President Trump initiated a record low number of legal actions against polluters in 2025 compared with past administrations. By reviewing court records, EIP found the Department of Justice filed just 16 lawsuits on the EPA’s behalf that year.
Those 16 actions represent an 87% drop from President Obama’s first year of his second term, a 76% decline from President Biden’s first year, and an 81% decrease compared with Trump’s first year in 2017. The EPA depends on the Justice Department to bring enforcement suits, and staffing shortages in the DOJ’s environment division appear to be a factor: an E&E News analysis found at least a third of lawyers in that division left in the past year.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch emailed NPR that the agency remains committed to clean air, land and water and emphasized a focus on “swift compliance” rather than what she called “overzealous enforcement.” Hirsch called the EIP report “erroneous” and said the EPA will publish figures showing it “has concluded more cases in the first year of the Trump administration than the Biden administration had in its last year.”
EIP also reported a decline in administrative penalties. Through September, the EPA imposed $41 million in penalties — about $8 million less (adjusted for inflation) than the same period in Biden’s first year and $5 million less than in Trump’s first administration. Jen Duggan, EIP’s executive director, said weak enforcement makes environmental laws “meaningless” and increases the likelihood of illegal air and water pollution that threatens public health and quality of life.
EIP notes measuring enforcement in a president’s first year has limits, since some cases take more than a year to resolve, and the group found areas where the current administration’s enforcement was higher than past administrations, such as certain drinking water standards.
The enforcement analysis comes as the Trump administration emphasizes deregulation, government reorganization, and policies that have encouraged departures by federal employees, including at the EPA. In March, Administrator Zeldin announced plans to target more than two dozen rules and policies, calling it the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” The administration frames many actions in economic terms while seeking to reverse Biden-era climate policies and boost domestic fossil fuel production.
Last September at the United Nations, President Trump called climate change a “con job” and the administration previously withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement. Zeldin said the administration aims to “drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.”
Planned rollbacks include repealing power plant climate pollution limits, overturning a 2009 EPA finding that underpins many federal climate actions, and ending vehicle greenhouse gas rules. Those policy moves are occurring as climate scientists report the past three years have been the hottest on record and warn that warming may be accelerating.