Under Trump, the EPA’s enforcement efforts fall to a 40-year low in this one key area

As the Trump administration draws flak for how it’s running the Environmental Protection Agency, one critic is putting out charts like the one above to make his case. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s Chris Sellers provided the above graphic and others to a Democratic-controlled House subcommittee that held a hearing last week on a drop in the EPA’s enforcement efforts. The chart shows how “civil judicial referrals” have slumped to a level last seen in 1976. Such cases refer to “the most egregious offenses” that the EPA refers to the Justice Department, Sellers said at the Tuesday hearing.“Over the past two years, EPA enforcement has declined significantly,” he told the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s panel on oversight and investigation. “Most of the available measures of the agency’s performance are registering 10- or 15-year lows at the very least.”