WASHINGTON — During the first three years of the Bush administration, the number of civil lawsuits that the federal government filed against polluters dropped by 75% compared with the last three years of the Clinton administration, an environmental group reported Tuesday.
Eric Schaeffer, director of the group that compiled the data, said they showed that the administration had been weak on enforcing anti-pollution laws.
Bush administration officials defended their record, saying that the real measure of effectiveness should be whether pollution was being reduced, not the quantity of lawsuits. They said they has emphasized negotiated settlements as a speedier alternative to protracted litigation.
And they said that new anti-pollution rules proposed by the administration would bring more improvements in air quality than would legal action.
The number of lawsuits filed over alleged pollution-law violations dropped from 152 in the three years ended in January 2001 to 36 in the three years ended in January 2004, according to EPA data analyzed by the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group.
Schaeffer, who left his job as the head of the EPA enforcement office almost three years ago to protest what he considered the Bush administration's lax approach to cracking down on polluters, said the data showed that "my concerns were, unfortunately, justified."
But Tom Skinner, acting assistant EPA administrator in charge of enforcement, called Schaeffer's analysis "completely misleading."
"The fundamentally flawed premise seems to be that filing cases in and of themselves are beneficial to the environment," Skinner said.
Schaeffer said the administration had been particularly easy on energy companies, the nation's biggest polluters. The Justice Department filed three new lawsuits against power companies, oil companies and pipelines during the first three years of the Bush administration, compared with 28 such suits filed in the last three years of the Clinton administration, according to Schaeffer's report.
"If you're a big energy company, you're basically on holiday from enforcement," Schaeffer said.
Skinner disputed that assertion, saying the Bush administration had been busy seeking settlements in enforcement actions against refineries rather than filing lawsuits. Settlements reached so far require that new pollution controls be installed on 40% of the nation's refineries.
