A watchdog report says the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump pursued far fewer legal actions against polluters in 2025 than recent administrations. The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) reviewed court records and found the Justice Department filed just 16 lawsuits on the EPA’s behalf that year.
Those 16 filings represent sharp declines compared with past first-year benchmarks: 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 from Trump’s own first year in 2017. The EPA relies on the Justice Department to bring enforcement suits, and staffing gaps in 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 within the past year.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch told NPR by email that the agency remains committed to clean air, land and water and is prioritizing “swift compliance” over what she called “overzealous enforcement.” Hirsch described the EIP report as “erroneous” and said the agency will publish numbers 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 found a drop in administrative penalties. Through September, the EPA imposed about $41 million in penalties — roughly $8 million less (adjusted for inflation) than the same period in Biden’s first year and about $5 million less than in Trump’s first administration. Jen Duggan, EIP’s executive director, warned that weak enforcement makes environmental laws “meaningless” and raises the risk of illegal air and water pollution that can harm public health and quality of life.
EIP acknowledged limits to measuring enforcement solely in a president’s first year, noting that some cases take more than a year to resolve. The group also flagged areas where the current administration’s enforcement exceeded past administrations, including certain drinking water standards.
The enforcement analysis arrives amid a broader Trump administration push toward deregulation and agency reorganization that officials say has encouraged departures by federal employees, including at the EPA. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to target more than two dozen rules and policies, calling the effort the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.” The administration frames many rollbacks 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 has 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 shifts are occurring as climate scientists report the past three years have been the hottest on record and warn that warming may be accelerating.