Wednesday, June 23, 2021
The White House announced on July 22, 2021, President Biden’s nomination of David Uhlmann to be the Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Uhlmann is currently the director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School and was previously a federal prosecutor for 17 years, including as the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section of the US Department of Justice. His nomination signals the White House’s clear intent to reinvigorate EPA’s enforcement program after what the EPA’s Inspector General found in its March 31, 2020 report to be years of declining case statistics across multiple administrations.
The Biden administration identified environmental justice (“EJ”) as a campaign priority
1 and the Biden-Harris team has continually emphasized its commitment to environmental justice, stating that the administration would “[e]nsure that environmental justice is a key consideration in” among other things “righting wrongs in communities that bear the brunt of pollution.”
2 How the incoming administration translates its policy statements into action that directly impacts the regulated community in the enforcement context remains an open question.
There is a well-established framework for EJ programs going back several decades. EJ has grown to include a range of issues, many of which do not directly implicate enforcement. The Biden administration’s EJ focus will likely be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The differentiators may prove to be the level of focus and resources devoted to EJ issues and the extent to which EJ practice and programs become further embedded