Cynthia Giles who headed EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration conducted an analysis which highlighted this information and these concerns.  Giles, now a guest fellow at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, questioned whether the new approach can achieve what administration officials promise.

“The public expects EPA to protect them from the worst polluters,” she said. “The Trump EPA is not doing that. What worries me is how industry will respond to EPA’s abandonment of tough enforcement.”

The decline in civil penalties could undermine the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment. (Washington Post, 1/24/19)

Two other nonprofit groups, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, also issued their own reports based off of EPA enforcement data in recent months and they came to similar conclusions.

During his Jan. 16 Senate confirmation hearing, Wheeler sought to rebut the two groups’ findings.

He told the Senate panel that they made some “some simple mathematical errors” and that he places a greater priority on helping companies avoid violations than on punishing them after the fact.  (Bloomberg BNA, 1/25/19)