Legal Analysis

In spite of overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that human-caused climate change is a serious threat that requires immediate action, the EPA under the Trump administration repeatedly casts doubt on climate science. This is in keeping with a decades-long effort by some in the fossil fuel industry to discredit climate science as a means of averting government action. For months at the beginning of the administration, the EPA perpetrated a form of passive disinformation on climate by hiding information about climate science that it used to make public on its website, while leaving increasingly out-of-date information for visitors to search in archived web pages. In 2018, then-Administrator Pruitt escalated his own active disinformation campaign.

The EPA has long relied on competitive merits-based grant-making to support activities that deliver critical environmental improvements, pollution reductions, and public education. Until now, grant applications have been evaluated by career professional staff exclusively for their technical merit, and not on the basis of partisan political considerations. Now, the EPA has assigned a political appointee to review all grant solicitations and awards, which has not been done in any other administration.

Collecting information is critical to many of EPA’s tasks, especially those that ensure polluters are complying with the law and, for purposes of assuring compliance or of enforcement, detecting sources that are not. EPA’s ten regional offices, acting on their own authority, are instrumental in this type of information collection. This process has been slowed, and potentially fouled, by a new directive requiring all Agency requests for information from polluters, including those initiated by the Regions, to be cleared by headquarters.

For years, EPA embraced its obligation to ensure that polluters estimated potential future emissions increases accurately, since those estimates are the cornerstone of a Clean Air Act program aimed at limiting local air pollution increases. Now, it has stepped away from that obligation.

The EPA has changed its policy on litigation in ways that make it harder for citizens and courts to hold the agency accountable when it fails to do its job.