The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the difficult mission of crafting complex environmental rules and regulations while considering the economic costs of those actions. The Agency must also engage in law enforcement functions to enforce these rules and regulations to ensure compliance, punish appropriately, and deter future offenders. Most of these enforcement actions rely on civil remedies to gain compliance, such as negotiating consent decrees or issuing civil penalties. In cases of willful, chronic, or serious offenses, the Agency can seek criminal penalties. Little academic and legal research goes beyond explaining civil punishments to describing criminal punishment outcomes by EPA, particularly across regional offices. This Comment undertakes content analysis of the EPA Summary of Criminal Prosecutions database of all cases across all 10 regional offices in which EPA sought criminal sanctions against environmental offenders from 1983 to 2019  to provide insight into the Agency’s criminal enforcement efforts over the past 37 years and create a basis for understanding what the Agency does to punish offenders with its criminal enforcement apparatus.

The recent passing of William D. Ruckelshaus has recalled and re-invited comparisons between the Trump and Nixon presidencies. Although Ruckelshaus might be most widely remembered for the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a review of his career in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations demonstrates a through-line of sound administration and independent regulatory leadership, at times in contrast to or in spite of his political environment. This Article explores the course of Ruckelshaus’ career in environmental regulation, focusing on his two terms as Administrator of EPA, in order to better understand the ways in which administrative and regulatory agencies gain, squander, and restore the most basic currency of government: credibility. Drawing from a number of unpublished primary materials, it fi nds that regulatory programs independent of presidential pressure are necessary to legitimate and credible executive government, and argues that this independence is lacking in the centralized power structure of the current Administration.