Clearing the Air: Recent Trump Administration Reforms to Environmental Criminal Enforcement

About this episode

The episode discusses recent reforms to environmental criminal enforcement under the Trump Administration, focusing on the DOJ's decision to end prosecutions for vehicle tampering under the Clean Air Act.

With the growth of the administrative state over the last half-century, an equal expansion has occurred in the number of actions committable by individual citizens that can be prosecuted as crimes. At President Trump’s direction, the U.S. Department of Justice has initiated a new round of reforms aimed at ending “over-criminalization” of the Nation’s complex web of regulatory laws and standards. Most recently, DOJ announced that it was exercising enforcement discretion to dismiss several Biden-era prosecutions of individuals charged with violating the Clean Air Act who were alleged to have tampered with emissions-related diagnostic systems on cars and trucks. Supporters of the Biden-era policies and critics of this new policy argue that such emissions control deliver considerable benefits to the owner in the form of better fuel efficiency, and to society, in the form of cleaner air, and that this is a step backwards in environmental enforcement. This panel will discuss DOJ’s traditional approaches to criminal enforcement of administrative laws and regulations and offer viewpoints on recent reforms and changes to criminal enforcement in the current…

People in this episode

Host: Justin Savage

Guests: Granta Nakayama, John Irving

Topics covered

• environmental law
• criminal enforcement
• administrative state
• over-criminalization
• emissions control
• regulatory reforms

Keywords

• environmental criminal enforcement
• Trump Administration reforms
• DOJ
• Clean Air Act
• vehicle tampering
• over-criminalization
• Biden-era policies

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: U.S. Department of Justice, Clean Air Act, Biden, Trump Administration, King & Spalding LLP, Sidley Austin LLP, Secil Law

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