It’s day 42 of the U.S. government shutdown, but an end is finally in sight. On Sunday night, the Senate voted to move forward with funding for the federal government through January 30. That vote, in which eight Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans, is expected to be followed by approval from the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and President Donald Trump. With many Democratic officials condemning the capitulation of their Senate colleagues, a revival of the shutdown is a distinct possibility after funding expires again next year.

One of the many adverse effects of the current shutdown is that, for weeks now, the nation’s top environmental cop has been off duty. While it’s too early to know the exact consequences of the dysfunction, analogous situations in the recent past indicate that polluters often increase their emissions during periods of relaxed enforcement. With such periods becoming regular features of the U.S. political process, the cumulative environmental fallout could be significant.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement division is responsible for making sure the country’s cornerstone environmental laws — the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and hazardous waste laws among them — are followed. From Washington, D.C., and 10 regional offices across the country, these staffers police some of the nation’s biggest polluters. They conduct surprise inspections at refineries, power plants, and factories. They review data and reports to check compliance. And, when they find violations, they issue fines and work with the Justice Department to take offenders to court until they course correct.

But since the shutdown began on October 1, the EPA has gradually furloughed most of its civil enforcement staff. At first, only a handful of employees were sent home at the start of the month, and the agency kept most workers on using unspent funds from previous budget years. As that funding ran out, however, the agency furloughed most of its workforce. Since only essential staff that protect the public from imminent threats are retained during furloughs, the vast majority of enforcement staffers had been ordered to stay home by the end of the month.

“The inspection and enforcement arm of the agency has largely been shuttered,” said Justin Chen, president of AFGE Council 238, the union that represents agency employees. “The large majority of inspectors and enforcement officers, along with attorneys who work with them to conduct the settlements and other legal actions against regulated entities, are all furloughed right now.” Chen himself was furloughed on October 20.

Previous pauses in enforcement indicate that a lack of federal oversight can embolden polluters. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University examined emissions data from 204 coal-fired power plants from across the country during the last major federal shutdown at the end of 2018. They found that the coal plants released 15 to 20 percent more particulate matter during the 35 days when the government was shut down and EPA enforcement officers were furloughed. When the shutdown ended and the inspectors returned to their jobs, emissions returned to pre-shutdown levels. The findings were robust even though the researchers controlled for changes in weather, use of more polluting coal varieties, and other factors. That suggests that the plants were less likely to operate their pollution controls when they knew they were unlikely to get caught.

“The only possibility is a temporary change of the end-of-pipe pollution abatement device,” said Ruohao Zhang, a professor at Penn State and lead author of the study, which was published last month. Zhang and his colleagues relied on data reported by the coal plant operators to the EPA as well as satellite data from NASA. They examined particulate matter levels in a 1.8-mile radius around the coal plants.

While Zhang was not able to comment on the legality of such moves on the operators’ part, he said that it indicated there was a higher possibility of a violation. The current shutdown creates similar incentives as the last time around, he said. “Now without the EPA’s watching, this increased possibility [of being cited for violating environmental laws] is no longer there,” he said.

Researchers found a similar trend in the spring and summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 shutdown. At the time, the EPA announced that facilities that weren’t able to monitor and report their emissions would be excused from compliance. Companies took the EPA up on the offer. Self-reported data from polluting facilities showed that companies conducted 40 percent fewer emission tests at smokestacks in March and April of 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019. American University researchers also found that counties with six or more polluting facilities reporting to the EPA saw a 14 percent increase in particulate matter pollution after the EPA announced its enforcement policy in 2020.

Shutdowns ultimately send the message that nobody is watching, said Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement staffers.

“It means that communities may be more exposed to pollution,” she said, “if companies do break the laws, and there’s no one from EPA working to be able to respond.”

The EPA’s regional offices each have about 18 staffers dedicated to handling each of the three main enforcement areas: air, water, and hazardous waste and toxics. Chen estimated that roughly 600 EPA employees were responsible for enforcement at the regional level. In part, these employees supervise the many environmental enforcement activities delegated to individual states. Additionally, the EPA has also assigned staff to enforce environmental laws in consultation with tribes, since many federally recognized tribes haven’t been granted authority to implement environmental laws.

The near-complete halt of inspections and case processing activities is likely to have significant implications for the EPA’s enforcement work. For one, any administrative settlements the agency might want to enter into with a polluter are contingent on utilizing evidence not more than a year old, unless the agency secures a waiver from the Justice Department. As a result, staff tend to front-load the work at the beginning of the fiscal year, which starts October 1, Chen said. But given that they’ve been furloughed for the past several weeks, it “makes it very difficult timing-wise to do some sort of administrative settlements to get a quick resolution on certain things,” Chen said.

The furloughs are the latest setback to hit EPA staff. The Trump administration has conducted multiple rounds of layoffs and offered buyouts to workers this year. While it’s unclear exactly how many EPA enforcement staffers were let go or resigned, the EPA is in the process of reducing its headcount by nearly 25 percent. The Department of Justice, or DOJ, has also lost at least 4,500 workers to layoffs and buyouts. As a result, the Justice Department’s environmental enforcement arm has shrunk by about half.

Once the EPA identifies environmental violations, the Justice Department pursues cases against polluters and enters into legal settlements with them. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project first reported by the Washington Post, the DOJ has brought just nine major civil cases against polluters in the first eight months of the Trump administration. That’s a major decrease compared to Trump’s first term, when the DOJ brought 53 cases during the same time period.

An EPA spokesperson told the Post that the number of civil cases did not reflect relaxed enforcement on the Trump administration’s part, citing other metrics in which she claimed Trump had outperformed the Biden administration, but Duggan, the Environmental Integrity Project’s executive director, disagreed.

“That’s a significant slowdown of the enforcement process,” she said. “If you are cutting the staff that are doing that job, you know that’s going to have an impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How government shutdowns give polluters a free pass on Nov 11, 2025.

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