The Trump administration is just as aggressive in prosecuting polluters as its predecessors, top environmental enforcement officials said Tuesday, even if the number of cases isn’t as high.
“We absolutely are” dedicated to enforcing environmental laws, Susan Bodine, the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement chief, said at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association. “We are very, very busy, and very much leaning into our cases.”
Bodine was pushing back on criticism from environmental groups that the EPA’s enforcement numbers have sharply declined during the Trump administration.
For example, the environmental group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility in a report earlier this year said the EPA in fiscal year 2018 generated the fewest new criminal case referrals since 1988, suggesting the drop-off was part of “the Trump plan to cripple the EPA,” according to Kyla Bennett, the group’s science policy director.
But Jeffrey Bossert Clark, the Justice Department’s top environment attorney, said environmental groups critiques are “just meaningless statistics mongering.”
“Susan and I are not in the widget-producing business,” Clark added in remarks to the conference. “Each of the cases that come to us are a different thing.”
Bodine added that she didn’t want to give her staff a quota for case numbers.
“I could direct the staff to get the numbers up and go after a lot of really small cases, but to what end?” she said. “Are we making a difference in terms of water quality and air quality? We want to have the cases that make a difference.”
Taking on bigger cases is also the defense the Obama EPA’s enforcement chief, Cynthia Giles, gave lawmakers for their declining enforcement numbers, Bodine added.
“I don’t know if it was OK if she says it, and not OK if I say it,” Bodine said.
