EPA Budget Cuts: Welcome Change or Cause for Concern?

The Trump administration’s proposed budget cut of approximately 25 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement budget ($129 million) is consistent with candidate Trump’s platform targeting the EPA for failing to appropriately favor crucial business interests against what he perceives as environmentalists hell-bent on the dismantlement of the U.S. industrial base. Whether we are facing the cataclysmic disintegration of long-standing federal environmental programs, or logical budget cuts related to streamlining and modernizing an over-bulked EPA largely depends upon the vitriol of the media source reporting the news, but it is undeniable that cutting enforcement is a direct attack on the foundation of all environmental laws; the perception that a violator will be held accountable in some way.

Enforcement of environmental law is a prime example of the complex dynamics among federal, state and citizen authority. Most environmental statutes are designed to be delegated to the states for implementation, provided the states enact legislation at least as stringent as the federal provisions. The EPA has determined that much of Pennsylvania’s Air Pollution Control Act meets that standard, for example, and thus the Department of Environmental Protection (as well as Philadelphia’s Air Management Services) have been delegated authority to issue key permits, and to take pertinent enforcement actions to deter noncompliance. Environmental statutes also generally have broad citizen suit provisions allowing groups or individuals to act as private attorneys general in prosecuting violations against purported violators. The citizens suits provision in environmental laws represent a congressional acknowledgment that government enforcement is subject to failure due to scarce resources, political pressure and other factors, which prevents full and adequate enforcement of the laws. These provisions create a sort of dysfunction in the enforcement scheme, as they allow the federal government to overfile when it determines that a state has failed to take, or to adequately pursue, enforcement, while citizen environmental groups distrust the regulated industry as well as state and federal governments’ vulnerability to political and economic pressure. Thus, there is a three-legged stool of environmental enforcement.