The Laws Still Exist, the Consequences Don’t: America’s Vanishing Environmental Enforcement
The Trump administration has stepped back from suing polluters and is now claiming the right to block citizens from doing so too.
This week I’m turning over The Watershed to Laura Thoms, the Director of Enforcement at Earthjustice. She recently left the Department of Justice’s environmental enforcement section – part of an exodus of attorneys. With the Trump administration largely abandoning the enforcement of environmental laws, it falls on regular citizens and nonprofits like Earthjustice to try to pick up the slack. Now that remedy is under attack, too. - Sam
Imagine living next to a factory that dumps waste into the river behind your house to save on treatment costs. Or a refinery that shuts off its pollution controls because no one is checking. You don’t need to care deeply about environmental laws to know that’s wrong. And you don’t need to be a legal expert to know that if you break the law, there should be consequences.
But the consequences for polluting are vanishing since Trump returned to office. And this week, his administration took an unprecedented step to derail environmental enforcement.
First, the Department of Justice has nearly stopped bringing cases against polluters.
In 2025, the Trump administration filed only 21 civil environmental enforcement cases in court. That’s less than a third of the cases filed by the federal government during the same period in 2024, and far lower than any year in modern history, including Trump’s own first term.
2026 is not shaping up any better — as of May 20, the administration had filed just 12 cases.
Penalties show the same alarming trend.
In the first 19 days of 2025, before Trump took office, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed settlements totaling $590 million in civil environmental penalties. In the 16 months since, DOJ’s settlements imposed just $22.5 million in civil penalties.
By comparison, DOJ collected $1.88 billion in civil environmental penalties in 2024.
And over the 10 years prior to the second Trump administration, DOJ averaged hundreds of millions in penalties per year, with several years exceeding the billion-dollar mark.
This isn’t a dip. It’s a collapse.
Now, the federal government is trying to shut down the rights of citizens to sue polluters.
Our core environmental laws include a remedy for people facing illegal pollution where the government does nothing about it: Citizens can sue.
To take one example, residents sued the city of Flint and the state of Michigan in 2016 for illegally exposing them to lead-contaminated water. The plaintiffs first petitioned the EPA to address the violations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Getting no response, they filed a citizen suit.
After fending off two attempts to get the case dismissed, the citizens won. The decision required Michigan to pay $97 million to remove lead pipes and fund other remediation measures.
Lawsuits like these could be a thing of the past if Trump’s Justice Department has its way.
On June 15, the department intervened in a citizen suit filed against Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI. The NAACP, represented by Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center, brought the case over air pollution from dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines that power an xAI data center. (Read more about it here.)
The Justice Department stepped into the case to argue — for the first time in history — that the executive branch has the unilateral power under the Constitution to dismiss citizen suits. This flies in the face of well-settled precedent. In the half century since Congress passed the Clean Air Act, courts have uniformly upheld communities’ right to protect themselves from illegal pollution by holding companies accountable under federal law.
Now Trump’s DOJ claims that it has an unreviewable and unlimited veto power over citizen suits. According to DOJ, if the federal government doesn’t want to hold polluters accountable — for any reason at all — there’s nothing that impacted communities, the courts, or even Congress can do about it.
What’s to deter polluters?
Without enforcement, environmental laws are just words on paper. Companies can dump toxic waste like coal ash in our rivers, release more soot and smog, spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air, and basically cut every corner that saves them a dollar but costs the rest of us in medical bills, lower property values, and premature deaths. Enforcement is what makes the law real.
That’s a problem, because chances are pretty good that DOJ will not be enforcing environmental violations in your community. And when enforcement disappears, polluting becomes a business strategy, and workers, families, and children pay the price.
If the administration truly wants “the cleanest air and water in the world,” as it claims, it must fully fund and embrace the enforcement needed to achieve it.
Until then, Earthjustice will step in, ramping up our efforts to protect communities and ensure that environmental laws are worth more than the paper they’re written on.
We cannot fully replace the resources that only the federal government can mobilize. We can try to deter companies from polluting in the future if there remains a credible threat that they will be held accountable by the ordinary people harmed along the way.
But if DOJ has its way, that credible threat disappears.
Thank you Laura for a very timely and important story.
How long do we have to put up with this?