Has the EPA lost its teeth? House to investigate dwindling enforcement.

Much attention has been paid to the Trump administration rollbacks of environmental regulations. But while those decisions can get tangled in the courts for months if not years, another shift is occurring on the ground: drastic reductions in pollution enforcement.

Earlier this month the Environmental Protection Agency released its enforcement data for fiscal year 2018, and in many key areas data continued to show a downward trend in the civil and criminal punitive measures meted out to large polluters. And on Tuesday the House Committee on Energy and Commerce announced it will hold a hearing next week to investigate the Trump EPA’s “troubling enforcement record.”

With large cases that often stretch out over several years, and where a handful of big settlements can drastically shift figures, the variability can make it difficult to compare enforcement figures year to year. But observers say a holistic look at enforcement across a wide variety of measures has raised strong concerns about the degree to which the agency is holding