In April 2009, the city of Atlanta signed a consent decree that would transform its sewer system. For decades, hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage had poured into the Chattahoochee River and South River during heavy rains — a public health catastrophe hidden in plain sight. Under the terms of the decree, Atlanta committed to spending $2.4 billion to overhaul its combined sewer system, build massive storage tunnels deep beneath downtown, and restore the creeks and waterways that generations of neglect had turned into open sewers.
It worked. Over the next fifteen years, Atlanta's sewer overflows dropped by more than 80 percent. The Chattahoochee became swimmable again in stretches that hadn't been safe for decades. Fish populations recovered. Property values along restored waterways climbed. A consent decree — a legally binding agreement between a government agency and a violator, enforceable by a federal judge — accomplished what decades of complaints, public hearings, and voluntary commitments had not.
That's what consent decrees do. They turn the promise of environmental law into concrete action, with deadlines, penalties, and judicial oversight. They are the enforcement mechanism that gives laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and Superfund their teeth.
And they are disappearing.
The Numbers Tell the Story
In January 2026, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) published a devastating analysis of federal environmental enforcement under the current administration. The numbers are not ambiguous.
In FY 2025, the Department of Justice lodged one single Clean Air Act consent decree. For comparison: in the first year of Trump's first term in 2017, DOJ lodged 26 Clean Air Act consent decrees. In Biden's first year, 22. One versus twenty-six. One versus twenty-two.
Clean Water Act consent decrees fell to four — a record low under any administration in the modern era. That's roughly a quarter of the pace set during both the 2017 and 2021 inaugural years.
Superfund cleanup settlements hit similar lows. PEER found that all but six of the consent decrees entered during FY 2025 were actually lodged by previous administrations — meaning the current enforcement pipeline has nearly run dry.
The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) reinforced these findings in its own February 2026 report, documenting that civil judicial cases resolved fell from 186 in FY 2013 to just 40 in FY 2025. Of those 40, fully 33 were initiated by prior administrations. The system isn't just slowing down. It's coasting on momentum from years ago, and that momentum is almost gone.
2,374 Facilities Nobody's Checking
The consent decree collapse doesn't exist in isolation. It sits atop a broader erosion of compliance monitoring that is now visible in EPA's own data.
EPA maintains a public database called ECHO — the Enforcement and Compliance History Online system — available to anyone at echo.epa.gov. It's one of the most powerful environmental transparency tools in the world: you can search any regulated facility in America, see its inspection history, its violations, its penalties, and whether anyone is actually enforcing the law.
What ECHO reveals right now is alarming. According to the PEER analysis of ECHO data:
2,374 major sources of air pollution have not had a full compliance evaluation in at least five years. These aren't small operations. These are facilities that EPA itself classifies as "major sources" — power plants, refineries, chemical manufacturers, large industrial operations.
More than 400 major sources with serious violations that EPA considers "high priority" for enforcement have had no enforcement action taken. Zero. These are facilities that EPA's own system has flagged as significant violators, and the response has been silence.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop. When facilities see that serious violations go unenforced, the incentive to invest in compliance weakens. When communities see that flagged violations produce no action, trust in the regulatory system erodes. The database becomes a monument to inaction — the violations are documented, the evidence is public, and nothing happens.
What a Consent Decree Actually Does
To understand why this matters, it helps to understand what consent decrees actually accomplish — and why no other enforcement tool substitutes for them.
A consent decree is a court-supervised settlement. When EPA and the Department of Justice determine that a facility or government entity has violated environmental law, they negotiate an agreement that specifies exactly what the violator must do to come into compliance: install pollution controls, upgrade infrastructure, remediate contaminated sites, pay penalties, and fund supplemental environmental projects. A federal judge approves and monitors the agreement. If the violator fails to meet deadlines, the court can impose additional penalties.
This is not a suggestion letter. This is not a voluntary commitment. This is a binding legal instrument with the full authority of the federal judiciary behind it.
The track record speaks for itself. Coal-fired power plant consent decrees have driven the installation of billions of dollars in pollution controls — scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction systems, baghouses — producing reductions of tens of thousands of tons per year of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Those reductions translate directly into fewer asthma attacks, fewer heart attacks, and cleaner air in communities downwind of power plants.
Municipal wastewater consent decrees have forced cities across the country to invest in sewer infrastructure they'd neglected for decades. In the first half of 2019 alone, civil environmental consent decrees produced more than $4.5 billion in environmental remedies, a substantial share involving wastewater and stormwater infrastructure improvements.
Superfund consent decrees have compelled responsible parties to clean up contaminated land — recovering costs from polluters instead of taxpayers, and turning toxic sites into productive land. These aren't abstract policy victories. They're the reason specific rivers are fishable, specific neighborhoods are breathable, and specific drinking water supplies are safe.
The Policy Architecture of Retreat
The consent decree collapse didn't happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate policy choices that restructured how EPA approaches enforcement.
On March 12, 2025, EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) issued a memorandum that fundamentally altered enforcement priorities. The memo established that environmental justice considerations "shall no longer inform EPA's enforcement and compliance assurance work" and that race and socioeconomic status are not permissible considerations in exercising enforcement discretion. EPA's EJScreen mapping tool — which helped enforcement personnel identify communities bearing disproportionate pollution burdens — was disabled.
The memo also required that all enforcement and compliance actions align with Executive Order 14154, "Unleashing American Energy," and that any action that could restrict energy production or power generation receive advance leadership approval. Coal ash enforcement at active power plants was limited to "imminent threats to human health." The climate change enforcement initiative was refocused on border security and illegal HFC imports.
In April 2026, EPA proposed amendments to coal combustion residuals regulations that would replace uniform national standards with site-specific permitting discretion — meaning each facility could negotiate its own compliance benchmarks, its own monitoring locations, and its own cleanup levels. This shift from national floors to case-by-case negotiation raises fundamental questions about consistency, transparency, and whether communities near coal ash sites will receive equal protection.
On the criminal side, DOJ ordered federal prosecutors in January 2026 to drop criminal Clean Air Act tampering charges. Combined with EPA's guidance deprioritizing civil tampering enforcement, this signals to regulated entities that the consequences of non-compliance are diminishing across the board.
The States Respond — Unevenly
The enforcement vacuum hasn't gone entirely unfilled. A coalition of state attorneys general, led by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, formally called on EPA to rescind the March 2025 memorandum and restore traditional enforcement practices. Several states have increased their own enforcement activities and permit scrutiny to compensate for federal pullback.
But state capacity varies enormously. States with well-funded environmental agencies and strong political will — California, New York, New Jersey — can absorb some of the federal retreat. States with smaller budgets, fewer inspectors, and stronger political pressure from regulated industries cannot. The result is an emerging patchwork where environmental protection depends increasingly on which state you live in, not on the uniform federal standards that the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were designed to guarantee.
This is precisely the problem federal enforcement was created to solve. When Congress passed the major environmental statutes in the 1970s, it recognized that state-by-state enforcement would produce a race to the bottom — states competing for industry by offering lax enforcement. Federal consent decrees ensured a consistent floor. Without them, that floor is crumbling.
Your Right to Know
Here's what you can do right now: go to echo.epa.gov and search for facilities in your community. Look at the inspection history. Look at the violation flags. Look at whether enforcement actions followed. The data is public. It's updated regularly. And it tells a story that no press release can spin.
The EPR Foundation believes that accountability requires legibility — that people cannot hold institutions accountable for obligations they cannot see. ECHO is one of the best tools American taxpayers have ever built for seeing how environmental law actually works on the ground. Use it.
We also believe that consent decrees represent one of the most effective environmental protection mechanisms ever devised. They are not bureaucratic overreach. They are the mechanism by which promises become infrastructure, violations become cleanups, and laws become reality. When 186 civil judicial cases per year becomes 40 — when 26 Clean Air Act consent decrees becomes one — the laws don't change, but their meaning does.
Environmental law without enforcement is environmental fiction. The consent decree is how we made it real. We should be asking, loudly and clearly, why we stopped.
Sources: PEER, "The Collapse of Environmental Enforcement Under the Second Trump Administration" (January 2026); Environmental Integrity Project, "2025 Environmental Enforcement Report" (February 2026); EPA ECHO database (echo.epa.gov); EPA OECA memorandum (March 12, 2025); Foley & Lardner, "EPA's Revised National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives: One Year Later" (April 2026); Maryland Office of the Attorney General press release (2026).