EPA proposes National Compliance Initiatives for 2020–2023

摘要

Since President Donald Trump occupied the White House, the EPA has been methodically revising its approach to enforcement. One important policy change occurred in summer 2018 when the Agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) announced that the National Enforcement Initiatives (NEI) program, the OECA’s triannual prioritization of the country’s top noncompliance problems, would be revamped under a new title: National Compliance Initiatives (NCI). The announcement was contained in a memo in which the OECA outlined its selection criteria for the next round of NEIs, which will cover the years 2020 to 2023. The OECA has now proposed its NCIs for those years. While in the past the NEIs have tended to be fairly consistent from cycle to cycle, the proposed NCIs appear to significantly depart from that past practice and are reflective of the current EPA’s desire to put more weight on compliance assistance, rely less on an enforcement-first approach, and shift more of the enforcement burden to the states.