While attention has focused on Trump’s most splashy, explicit environmental policies—for instance, the administration’s proud evisceration of environmental protections such as auto fuel standards, oil drilling limits, and the “endangerment finding” underlying emissions regulations—a recent report shows the administration is also overhauling environmental policy in a quieter way: The Environmental Protection Agency is radically reducing enforcement of many environmental laws still on the books. Trump’s EPA, the report reveals, is overseeing a “historic” decline in enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws.According to the report, which was released by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI, last month, the EPA’s enforcement and compliance database, known as ECHO, shows major declines in enforcement, posing threats to the environment and public health. Compared with the final year under President Biden, the first year of Trump 2.0 produced a 40 percent plunge in lead paint hazard inspections, a 36 percent decline in toxic substances inspections, a 29 percent drop in average federal penalties for complaints filed, and a 29 percent increase in cases involving zero penalty for violators.These are not mere bureaucratic slippages, the report makes clear: Among some of the EPA’s “most important enforcement responsibilities”—such as inspections of hazardous waste, toxic substances, and air pollution—Trump’s EPA enforcement “is the worst of any administration in the last 20 years.”The agenda behind Trump’s epic rollback of environmental enforcement amounts to “Let’s inspect less, let’s enforce less, let’s fine less,” says report co-author Christopher Sellers, professor of history at SUNY Stonybrook in New York. “It’s all about making polluters’ savings great again.”The enforcement plunge is effectively erasing environmental protection, Sellers told me: “The whole idea of creating the EPA is that you need laws and ways of penalizing people if they don’t obey the laws. If you aren’t enforcing the laws, it’s like they’re not there.”When I asked the EPA about the EDGI report and Sellers’s assessment, press secretary Carolyn Holran responded with an email saying, “EPA will be publishing annual enforcement and compliance numbers in the near future. Suffice to say, they will upset narratives being peddled by left-wing climate cultists and show the Trump EPA is enforcing the law and carrying out its core statutory responsibilities of protecting human health and the environment like never before.”But the EPA’s own data shows a dramatically different trajectory. Inspections for drinking water fell by 15 percent in 2025, while inspections of air pollution and waste declined by 14 percent and water pollution by 5 percent, according to EDGI’s research of EPA data. Enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act is “way down,” Sellers notes. Penalties for violations have plummeted, the number of violations involving zero fines have shot up, and inspections are down.Buttressing EDGI’s report is similar analysis from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, which found the EPA has nearly halted actions against major polluters. EPA enforcement “is dying on the vine, and that’s intentional,” PEER executive director and former EPA attorney Tim Whitehouse told The Guardian in February. An unnamed current EPA employee also confirmed to The Guardian that PEER’s findings were consistent with what they were observing internally.This sweeping deregulatory push exacerbates a longer-term “retreat of EPA from enforcement” in recent decades, according to EDGI—an “accelerating decline” that “augurs deepening dangers to Americans’ health and mounting damage to their communities and environments in the years ahead.”One major area of enforcement decline involves the EPA’s rapidly fading use of the courts and judicial action to compel compliance with environmental protections. This plunge in EPA court action means less enforcement against particularly egregious environmental violators who are less compliance-minded, Sellers explains.In 2025, Trump’s EPA “launched fewer civil judicial cases than any other administration in the past 20 years,” EDGI found—just one-third of what the Biden administration initiated in 2024. The Trump EPA has overseen a 66 percent shriveling in judicial cases filed and a 46 percent decline in cases concluded, EDGI found.In this “historic retreat from the courtroom,” the report argues, EPA is initiating and concluding dramatically fewer cases against “the worst environmental violators.” It’s a huge shift even from prior Republican administrations. When the G.W. Bush EPA announced a “similar commitment” to deregulation in the early 2000s, the report notes, “it was taking polluters to court 20 times more often” than Trump has.