I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears that the Bush administration is dropping the ball, intentionally, in prosecuting polluters. Who could have imagined it?
The Environmental Protection Agency’s pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data.
The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics.
Critics of the agency say its flagging efforts have emboldened polluters to flout U.S. environmental laws, threatening progress in cleaning the air, protecting wildlife, eliminating hazardous materials, and countless other endeavors overseen by the EPA.
Eric Schaeffer, for example, was the director of the EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement in the Bush administration, but resigned in protest because the administration refused to seriously pursue enforcement. “You don’t get cleanup, and you don’t get deterrence,” Schaeffer said. “I don’t think this is a problem with agents in the field. They’re capable of doing the work. They lack the political support they used to be able to count on, especially in the White House.”
What’s more officials are in place to do the work on going after polluters — though the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division now has far fewer investigators than is required by the 1990 Pollution Prosecution Act — but no one in positions of authority is taking the issue seriously.
[E]nvironmental prosecutions by U.S. attorneys’ offices have sharply dropped as prosecutors facing new pressures on issues such as terrorism and immigration take away resources for environmental prosecutions and try to divert cases to the main Justice Department, EPA agents said.
“Environmental crimes are simply not in the U.S. attorney top 10 priorities,” said one senior EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media.
Prosecutors counter that the EPA has fewer agents and is bringing them fewer cases. “We’re not turning away environmental crimes in order to prosecute other crimes. They are just not being presented in the first case,” said Don DeGabrielle, the U.S. attorney in Houston.
EPA memos show that investigators also have encountered new obstacles to their long-standing practice of directly referring cases to federal or state prosecutors. A new policy distributed May 25 requires agents to seek prior approval from the head of their division and establishes new paperwork procedures. This has slowed agents’ ability to make referrals, congressional investigators said.
If I didn’t know better, I might think the Bush administration doesn’t much care about protecting Americans from polluted air. That couldn’t be, could it?