Our environmental laws are meaningless if they are not enforced. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plays a crucial role in ensuring that our environmental laws work for the American people, including taking enforcement action against polluters that break the rules and making sure that states enforce federal laws that protect the environment and communities from toxic and health-harming chemicals.
The number of judicial cases brought against polluters by EPA has declined sharply since President Trump took office, which has exacerbated a decades long trend of declining enforcement, in part because of cuts to both staff and funding at the agency. But this does not mean that polluters are violating the law less frequently, or that violations are less consequential for human health or the environment.
Some violations of environmental laws can be resolved with administrative actions instead of through the judicial system. But significant violations should be addressed through the courts and civil judicial enforcement cases brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and EPA that bring polluters back into compliance and ensure companies address harm caused by illegal pollution. The tables and data below track the number of civil judicial environmental cases brought and concluded by the EPA since 2001.
Download the data here.
Methods
This webpage combines enforcement case data from three sources: EPA’s historical annual enforcement reports, the Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database, and Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER), the federal courts’ online filing system.
Data for previous fiscal years are from EPA’s historical annual enforcement reports, which show how many lawsuits the government filed and how many cases it resolved each fiscal year. For the current fiscal year (FY 2026 at the time this page was published), we tallied up civil lawsuits filed and cases finalized (“entered”) by a judge using data from ECHO and PACER. For each case we recorded three things: the date the lawsuit was first filed, whether a proposed consent decree was filed alongside it, and the date a judge formally approved that consent decree. The government often negotiates a settlement before suing, as the DOJ and EPA may file the proposed settlement documents at the same time as the lawsuit or shortly after. When a case had more than one settlement date, we logged each date separately, along with any penalties or cleanup cost reimbursements tied to it. We also used PACER to verify the dates that ECHO reports, and where the two disagreed, we used the court record.
We update this data monthly as the EPA and Department of Justice file or settle new cases.
