In January 2026, the Environmental Integrity Project released a set of numbers that should have been front-page news in every city in America. Nearly 700 industrial plants and facilities across the United States were listed by the EPA as having "high priority violations" of air pollution laws — violations dating back almost three years. Of those 700 facilities, only 12 percent received any enforcement action in the previous year.
The numbers for water pollution were worse. More than 3,000 facilities were identified as being in "significant noncompliance" with the Clean Water Act, with violations stretching back at least three years. Just 2 percent of those facilities saw any enforcement action.
Read those numbers again. Thousands of facilities violating federal environmental law. Years of documented noncompliance. And in the vast majority of cases, nothing happens. No fine. No consent order. No lawsuit. No consequence at all.
This is not a story about one bad administration or one budget cycle. This is a structural failure decades in the making — and it is accelerating.
The Federal Collapse
The most visible dimension of the enforcement crisis is federal. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice filed just 16 civil environmental complaints on behalf of the EPA — a 76 percent decline from the first year of the Biden administration and an 81 percent decline from the first Trump administration. That is not a typo. The current pace of federal environmental litigation is lower than at any point in the modern history of the EPA.
Settlements tell the same story. In 2013, during the first year of President Obama's second term, the DOJ settled 186 civil environmental cases. In 2025, that number fell to 40. Administrative penalties collected by the EPA through September of the current fiscal year totaled roughly $41 million — well below comparable periods in previous administrations of either party.
The mechanism behind this decline is straightforward. The EPA's enforcement budget has been cut. Its workforce has been reduced. A March 2025 internal EPA memo stated that "environmental justice considerations shall no longer inform EPA's enforcement and compliance assurance work." The administration has pursued a roughly 23 percent reduction in EPA staffing — approximately 4,000 positions — with additional cuts to the DOJ's environmental enforcement section.
The official position is that this represents a shift toward "compliance assistance" rather than punitive enforcement. The practical result is that polluters face dramatically less risk of consequences for breaking the law.
The State-Level Erosion
Federal enforcement, however, was never the whole picture. The EPA has always relied on state environmental agencies to carry the bulk of the enforcement workload. Under the cooperative federalism model that governs most major environmental statutes — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — states receive delegated authority to implement and enforce federal environmental law. The EPA is supposed to serve as a backstop.
That model only works if state agencies have the resources to do the job. Increasingly, they do not.
A 2025 analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project found that from 2010 to 2024, nearly two-thirds of states — 31 in total — cut jobs at their environmental agencies, eliminating 3,725 positions. Over half of all states reduced their environmental agency budgets during the same period, with collective cuts totaling approximately $1.4 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that represents a roughly 33 percent reduction in national spending on state-level environmental regulation.
The cuts are not limited to one region or one political party. Mississippi cut its pollution control funding by 71 percent. South Dakota by 61 percent. Connecticut by 51 percent. Alabama by 49 percent. Texas by 33 percent. North Carolina lost nearly a third of its environmental agency staff — 394 positions eliminated between 2010 and 2024.
The consequences are predictable and documented. In Massachusetts, a 2017 review found that a one-third decrease in the Department of Environmental Protection's workforce over the previous decade led to a 50 percent drop in enforcement actions against serious violations and a 75 percent drop in fines collected. In Texas, the Commission on Environmental Quality accumulated a backlog of 1,400 enforcement cases, with the average case taking 351 days to process.
Georgia: A Case Study in Quiet Failure
Georgia offers a particularly instructive example. A 2022 report by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts examined the Georgia Environmental Protection Division's enforcement practices and found systemic problems with data tracking, policy centralization, and accountability.
The audit concluded that "data entry and system limitations prevent a full evaluation of the effectiveness of EPD's enforcement efforts." Auditors could not determine whether informal or formal enforcement actions were taken for all documented violations. They could not assess whether enforcement actions were effective at returning facilities to compliance. They could not even evaluate the timeliness of enforcement actions because the EPD lacked clear guidance on what constituted a reasonable timeframe.
Historical data tells a stark story: between 1998 and 2018, the total number of enforcement actions initiated by the Georgia EPD for violations related to water quality, air quality, and hazardous waste permits declined, as did the total settlement funds collected.
A 2011 EPA review of the Georgia EPD had already flagged ongoing issues with penalty calculation and documentation in Clean Water Act and RCRA programs, as well as late data entry into national databases for enforcement and compliance monitoring. More than a decade later, the state audit found many of the same problems persisting.
Georgia is not an outlier. It is the norm.
The Economics of Non-Enforcement
When enforcement becomes rare enough, something shifts in the cost-benefit calculation that every regulated entity makes. Environmental compliance is expensive. Installing pollution controls, monitoring emissions, maintaining treatment systems, filing reports — these activities cost money. When the probability of being caught and penalized for noncompliance drops low enough, the rational economic calculation for some operators tips toward violation.
This is not speculation. It is a well-documented phenomenon in regulatory economics. When Massachusetts saw its enforcement drop by 50 percent, it did not see a corresponding 50 percent improvement in voluntary compliance. It saw more violations. When Texas accumulated a 1,400-case backlog, it did not see industry rushing to self-correct. It saw facilities calculating that the average wait time of nearly a year before any action might be taken was an acceptable cost of doing business.
The fines themselves compound the problem. State environmental statutes frequently provide for lower penalty authority than their federal counterparts. Many states have not adjusted their penalty schedules for inflation in years or decades. A $10,000-per-day penalty that represented a serious deterrent in 1990 has a very different weight in 2026. Meanwhile, federal penalty adjustments under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act have widened the gap between what the EPA can assess and what most state agencies can impose.
The result is a system where the theoretical penalties for environmental violations — the numbers written into statute — bear little resemblance to the actual penalties imposed, which bear even less resemblance to the penalties collected.
What Gets Lost
The human cost of non-enforcement is difficult to quantify precisely, which is part of why it persists. When a facility exceeds its permitted air emissions for three years without consequence, the excess pollution does not announce itself. It enters the atmosphere. It settles into soil. It runs off into waterways. It is breathed by people who will never know it happened.
Environmental enforcement exists because voluntary compliance, on its own, has never been sufficient to protect public health. The entire modern framework of environmental law — from the Clean Air Act of 1970 to the PFAS regulations of the 2020s — was built on a simple premise: there must be consequences for pollution, or pollution will continue.
When nearly 700 facilities can carry high-priority air pollution violations for years without facing action, that premise is being tested. When over 3,000 facilities can remain in significant noncompliance with the Clean Water Act while only 2 percent face any enforcement, the premise is failing.
Where We Stand
At the EPR Foundation, we do not approach this as a partisan question. Environmental enforcement has ebbed and flowed across administrations of both parties. The state-level budget cuts documented by the Environmental Integrity Project span red states and blue states alike. The structural incentives that make non-enforcement attractive to cash-strapped agencies and politically connected industries transcend any single election cycle.
But the current trajectory is unsustainable. Federal civil enforcement has reached historic lows. State agencies have lost a third of their collective funding. Data systems remain too poor to even measure how badly the system is performing. And the communities most affected — those living near the facilities with the longest compliance histories — are overwhelmingly the communities with the least political power to demand accountability.
We believe that environmental laws mean nothing without enforcement. A permit condition that is never verified is not a condition — it is a suggestion. A penalty that is never assessed is not a deterrent — it is a fiction. And a regulatory system that cannot tell you whether it took action on a documented violation is not a system at all.
The enforcement actions that never happen are not a bureaucratic footnote. They are the gap between the environmental protection Americans believe they have and the environmental protection they actually receive. That gap is growing. And until citizens, legislators, and regulators decide to close it, it will continue to grow.
The EPR Foundation tracks environmental enforcement trends, regulatory changes, and public accountability in the waste and chemical sectors. Follow our work at eprfoundation.org.