DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Arm Has Been Captured by Industry, Critics Say

Tom Mariani spent nearly 40 years working as an environmental attorney inside the U.S. Department of Justice. But the return of President Donald Trump to office last year marked the end of his government career.

His departure was part of a mass exodus of civil servants across the federal government, including at the DOJ, in the beginning of the second Trump administration. Over the last year and half, thousands of career attorneys have exited the department, and many of its litigating divisions have been drastically downsized. The Civil Rights Division lost 70 percent of its attorneys within the first few months. The Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) lost more than a quarter of its workforce.

In June, the Trump administration announced that it would be dropping the word “environment” and replacing it with “energy” in a renamed Energy and Natural Resources Division with a re-tooled mission, “advancing U.S. energy dominance.” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson, the division’s new head, said in an emailed statement that “faithfully” enforcing environmental laws remains a central part of protecting “clean air, water, and land for all Americans.”

“There’s nothing incompatible about unleashing American energy and making America healthy again. We are achieving both,” he said.

But half a dozen former ENRD attorneys tell a different story, citing a substantial decline in the division’s enforcement of environmental laws and warning that this “collapse,” as one of those attorneys called it, threatens public health, the environment and the rule of law.

In the first year of Trump’s second term, the DOJ filed just 16 civil suits against polluters on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Environmental Integrity Project reported earlier this year. That number is an 81 percent drop from the first year of Trump’s first term and 76 percent lower than the first year of the Biden administration.

Matthew Nies, a DOJ spokesperson, noted a string of “significant environmental enforcement and defense work” since the start of the second Trump administration, including a $100 million air pollution penalty won at trial against a coke plant near Detroit. The case was filed in 2022 by the prior administration.

The former ENRD attorneys, and numerous environmental advocates, countered that the DOJ has named a former ExxonMobil attorney as the division’s senior counsel, intervened on behalf of polluters and gone on offense for the fossil fuel industry, suing states over their climate policies and efforts to hold oil companies accountable.

Environmental Enforcement Section Chief Forced Out

Mariani initially came to the DOJ in 1986 through the department’s Honors Program, a recruitment initiative for entry-level federal attorneys. During his time in the department, he worked on a wide range of pollution control and environmental cleanup cases, covering everything from wastewater treatment and Superfund sites to enforcing rules around emissions from coal-fired power plants.

He even worked for five years as the lead supervisor on the U.S. government’s litigation against oil major BP over the company’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That case resulted in a record-breaking $20.8 billion settlement with BP in 2015 — the largest settlement with a single entity in the DOJ’s history.

Following the negotiation of this settlement, Mariani was named head of the Environmental Enforcement Section in 2016 — a position in which he served for almost 10 years, until he said he was forced out at the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The new administration had created what was called the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group, and he and other top-level managers at the DOJ were told they were being transferred there.

“I had to decide whether I was going to stay with the department and take this new job, or leave,” Mariani said in an interview.

Four section chiefs within the environment division, including Mariani, were forced out of their jobs with the involuntary reassignments to this new working group. “It turned out more to be a way to get people out of the jobs they had,” he told Inside Climate News.

Mariani spent a few days trying to better understand what the new assignment would entail. “To me it really seemed like sort of a fake job. It just didn’t seem like a real thing. And so I decided for me, the better course was to leave.”

Mariani took his retirement and left the department in February 2025.

The demise of environmental enforcement under the second Trump administration, Mariani said, is unprecedented. As he explained in a December 2025 article, the DOJ “is rapidly moving away from enforcing the nation’s core pollution control laws in ways not seen in prior administrations, including President Trump’s first term.”

This shift, he wrote, is not just a mere change in priorities, but rather a “decision that will harm the rule of law and our environment.”

An Attorney Exodus

One year into Trump’s second term, the DOJ’s environment division had lost around a third of its lawyers, with at least 140 departures, according to Politico’s E&E News. “Those departures have cost ENRD, which at the start of 2025 employed about 400 attorneys, hundreds of years of institutional knowledge,” the news outlet reported in February.

Gustafson acknowledged that the division has seen staff decreases over the last year and half. “This attrition does not prevent us from fulfilling our mission, but it forces us to focus our affirmative litigation on cases that will achieve the greatest practical benefit for the American people,” he told Inside Climate News.

Sean Donahue, an environmental attorney at the firm Donahue, Goldberg, Herzog & Davidson, worked at ENRD in the appellate section from 1997 through 2001. He currently teaches a summer course titled “Federal Environmental Policy Under Trump II” at Vermont Law and Graduate School, and during a recent online talk on that topic, he remarked on the significant downsizing of the ENRD workforce.

“That’s massive, and a lot of that is in enforcement,” Donahue said. “That is enough that it is materially going to affect their ability to do their job, at least as Congress conceived it.”

The Environmental Enforcement Section has indeed shrunken dramatically. Mariani said it is now down to less than half the size it was on the day that he left. “It probably takes the section down to a size of the lowest it’s been in a few decades,” he told Inside Climate News.

Andrew Mergen, faculty director of Harvard University’s environmental law and policy clinic, previously worked at ENRD for 33 years and finished his service there as chief of the appellate section. The division, like other parts of the federal government, was impacted by the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts, he said, as many employees decided to leave or take buyout offers rather than risk staying on and being fired. DOJ attorneys who worked on environmental justice issues in particular “were essentially run out of the division,” Mergen said.

The Trump administration shuttered DOJ’s Office of Environmental Justice in February 2025. The office was created in 2022 under Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Another section within ENRD that took a big hit in attorney departures is Environmental Crimes. Deborah Harris, who headed the section until her exit last year, said the section had 42 attorneys at its peak, and now it is down to half that size. “There was quite an exodus,” she said.

Involuntary Reassignments

Harris, along with Mariani and two other heads of litigating sections within ENRD, received involuntary transfers in the days following Trump’s second inauguration. Their new assignment was with the sanctuary cities working group — a project that Harris said was “a complete joke.”

She and other top managers were sitting around with little substantive work on their hands. “We certainly were not litigating,” Harris recalled.

The group started up in February 2025, and by early May all but two of the attorneys, including Harris, had left. The last member of the working group departed by late August, leaving it with no members. The DOJ declined to confirm that the group has been dissolved or is no longer active, citing general department policy not to comment on “inner-departmental organization or function.”

Mergen told Inside Climate News that the involuntary reassignments of some of ENRD’s top section chiefs — including his successor, Jennifer Neumann, in the appellate section — was “shocking.” That shakeup, along with several other changes in the division within the first month of the new administration, prompted him along with two other ENRD alums to write a piece for the Legal Planet blog warning that the division “faces its most profound crisis since it was established in 1909.”

According to Harris, none of the four section chiefs who were reassigned have been replaced in terms of formal hiring. Deputy or assistant attorneys are now running those sections.

Collapse in Environmental Enforcement

In response to questions, Nies, the DOJ spokesperson, provided a list of ENRD enforcement successes that includes “major civil settlements” with a “forever chemical” manufacturer for water pollution, a grocery chain for coolant leaks and a steel mill for hazardous waste.

Among other cases are an 18-month prison sentence for biofuel fraud; a $500,000 criminal penalty for asbestos violations; guilty pleas to environmental crimes by wastewater pretreatment managers, a yacht manufacturer, a wood product importer and a builder; and indictments related to a commercial incinerator, wildlife trafficking and the ship that crashed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge.

Data analyzed by independent watchdog groups, however, tells a different story.

Like the Environmental Integrity Project, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) analyzed court records and found a “collapse” of environmental enforcement under Trump II, with a sharp drop in civil cases settled by the DOJ that were referred by the EPA.

“The shrinkage in DOJ’s environmental docket should not be surprising. Buyouts, threatened layoffs, budget cuts, and transfers have already eliminated half of DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section,” PEER wrote in its January 2026 analysis.

Laura Thoms, director of enforcement at Earthjustice who previously served for 19 years as an attorney at DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section, said in a December 2025 blog post that environmental laws are meaningless without enforcement.

“Companies can dump toxic waste like coal ash in our rivers, release more soot and smog, spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air, and basically cut every corner that saves them a dollar but costs the rest of us in medical bills, lower property values, and premature deaths,” Thoms wrote. Under the current administration, she said that corporate polluters are being given a free pass to evade environmental rules.

“The administration has bent over backwards to help corporations escape their legal obligations,” Thoms wrote, citing several examples.

She pushed back against the DOJ’s defense of its environmental enforcement record, telling Inside Climate News via email that “finishing a handful of cases largely developed, negotiated, and litigated under the Biden Administration hardly demonstrates a commitment to environmental enforcement.”

“To date, the Administration has hamstrung the ability of hardworking career staff to hold polluters accountable, blocking criminal investigations of Trump allies, pardoning convictions of Trump donors, and dismissing meritorious enforcement actions with prejudice,” she added.

As Thoms alluded to, in recent months the administration shut down a criminal investigation of potential Clean Water Act violations by coal companies run by the son of West Virginia Republican senator and Trump ally Jim Justice. As ProPublica reported, the move “is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.”

Trump himself also issued pardons earlier this month to nine people who had been convicted of crimes under the Clean Air Act related to installing or selling devices that defeat emissions controls on motor vehicles. Pursuing prosecutions for these defective devices used to be a priority, Harris said, but that is no longer the case under the current administration. The DOJ has now stopped criminal enforcement of the Clean Air Act in this area, The New York Times reported last month.

Civil enforcement of bedrock environmental laws like the Clean Air Act does not appear to be of much interest to the current administration, either. In June, for example, the administration made the unusual move to intervene in a citizen suit brought by the NAACP under the Clean Air Act that challenges the use of gas turbines by Elon Musk’s AI company, which have been operating at data centers in Mississippi without air pollution permits. The DOJ intervened on the side of the company, telling a federal court that the suit should be thrown out.

“The Department of Justice will not sit idly by while private organizations use environmental laws to undermine our national security,” Gustafson said in a statement announcing the department’s intervention in the suit. “This case reflects the important work of the Environment and Natural Resources Division to unleash American energy for the sake of innovation and security.”

A New Name and New Focus on Fossil Fuels

In a June 28 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “New Name, New Mission at the Justice Department,” Gustafson defended the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda. He describes some of the actions the division has taken in defense of “unleashing” coal, oil and gas, such as defending efforts to restart an offshore oil pipeline in California, an asserted oil and gas drilling exemption from the Endangered Species Act on national security grounds and emergency orders issued by the Department of Energy to keep coal plants online.

The DOJ is also going on offense, suing states over their climate policies and efforts to hold oil companies accountable.

Gustafson argues in the op-ed that these actions against states are starting to bear fruit. “Several states that were considering climate superfund laws have backed off. A federal court in California preliminarily enjoined California’s enforcement of pre-empted electric vehicle mandates. And, at our urging, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, a case that could shut down the cottage industry of climate tort litigation around the country.”

ExxonMobil, one of the defendants in that climate tort case brought by Boulder, Colorado, which the Supreme Court will hear in its upcoming term, even has one of its own former lawyers now working inside the DOJ.

Robert Levy, who spent 17 years at Exxon and served in a senior-level executive counsel role, left the company on July 12 and started working the next day as a senior counsel at the DOJ’s newly renamed “Energy” division. “I’m excited to contribute to the Administration’s energy priorities and to our nation’s environmental and legal landscape,” Levy wrote on LinkedIn, E&E News reported.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said this move suggests that “Big Oil’s capture of the U.S. government is now complete.”

“Instead of enforcing the nation’s environmental laws, the new so-called Energy and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department explicitly aims to abuse emergency powers to drive oil and gas production, override state environmental enforcement and generally serve at the beck and call of Big Oil,” Weissman said in a statement. “The Justice Department that should be fighting to protect clean air and water and avert catastrophic climate change will now work on behalf of polluters to advance the poisoning of people and the planet.”

The DOJ declined to comment on Levy joining its newly renamed division. It also declined a request from Inside Climate News to interview Levy.

Several former ENRD attorneys expressed concern and dismay about the division’s name change.

“It just makes me think we’re going to be even more of a cover for the oil and gas industry,” Harris said.

Thoms said it reflects “a whole-hearted embrace of [the division’s] new mission to push fossil fuels and data centers instead of protecting human health and the environment.”

“This change seems to be directed at an audience of one, Trump, who has declared an energy emergency and is somewhat fixated on fossil fuels,” said Mergen. “You don’t want to tie yourself to these industries too closely, because that’s not the job. The Justice Department’s job is not to promote fossil fuel. It’s to enforce laws and to defend agencies.”

Former DOJ attorneys also noted that the administration is promoting only certain types of energy while undermining others.

“They’re actually impeding the fastest-growing types of energy in the United States, which are solar and wind,” Donahue told Inside Climate News. “They’re not unleashing energy. They’re trying to protect fossil generation and fossil development.”

The DOJ’s environment division has undergone several name changes over the course of its 100-plus-year history. Before the current rebrand, the most recent came in 1990, when the name changed from “Land and Natural Resources” to “Environment and Natural Resources.”

Although the word “environment” has now been dropped from the name, Gustafson argues that the “division’s charge to steward America’s environment responsibly is unchanged.”

Mariani said that this seems like a “very hard argument to make.”

“You’ve got to look at the resource allocations,” he said.

Gustafson told Inside Climate News that enforcement “depends on referrals from investigative agencies. It also depends on the work of committed attorneys.”

“It is false to claim that ENRD is walking away from environmental enforcement,” Gustafson added. “Such assertions are unfair to our hard-working enforcement lawyers who continue to litigate against polluters every day.”

But regardless of the work or dedication of the attorneys, Mariani said “the environment and the rule of law will suffer” in the absence of adequate staffing and resources in the DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section.

“To the extent that any enforcement is happening at all, it is despite the actions of this administration and because of the tireless efforts of the public servants who have stayed to try to do the right thing against all odds,” Thoms said.

Politicization and Loss of Credibility

Martin LaLonde, now a state representative in Vermont, worked at ENRD from 1996 to 2007 under both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. The division’s work during that time, he said, was much less politicized, and attorneys had leeway to push back if they thought something they were told to defend was unlawful or was unlikely to hold up in court.

“We were the attorney for the federal agencies, but we didn’t have to defend whatever they told us to defend. We could explain that certain things were not defensible,” LaLonde said.

Now, by contrast, he said it seems like the division’s work is guided by a political agenda set by the president through executive orders. “It’s much more directed from above than what I experienced in the years I was there.”

He’s personally less worried about the name change “than just generally how it’s being run, and being politicized.”

Other ENRD alums that spoke with Inside Climate News shared his concern. They said the DOJ has lost credibility, including with judges and prospective job applicants.

“Based on conversations I’ve had with my former colleagues, I think the applicant pool is much, much smaller at this point,” said Paul Gormley, a former senior counsel at ENRD’s Environmental Enforcement Section.

Gustafson said in his emailed statement that ENRD is “hiring in our defensive and enforcement sections, and we continue to attract great lawyers who are proud to represent the United States.”

But former ENRD attorneys say that many law school graduates and other prospective candidates are largely refraining from applying for positions with the Trump DOJ.

“I know there is a perception that the Justice Department is not a comfortable or safe place to accept employment now,” Donahue said. ”It is all about serving Trump instead of serving the people of the United States and the laws of the United States.”