Has President Trump Just Limited Enforcement To Willful Violations?

On Tuesday, President Trump issued an Executive Order on Regulatory Relief to Support Economic Recovery.  I’ll leave to others a discussion of the provisions telling agencies to look for more regulations to roll back.  I’m in general agreement with commenters who have said that those provisions don’t add much to Trump’s prior deregulatory efforts and are likely to face mostly the same reception in the courts as prior efforts.

Instead, I want to focus on this provision:

The heads of all agencies shall consider whether to formulate, and make public, policies of enforcement discretion that, as permitted by law and as appropriate in the context of particular statutory and regulatory programs and the policy considerations identified in section 1 of this order, decline enforcement against persons and entities that have attempted in reasonable good faith to comply with applicable statutory and regulatory standards, including those persons and entities acting in conformity with a pre-enforcement ruling.

I hate to give the President too much credit, but this may be the most significant deregulatory measure he’s taken.  As far as I can tell, Trump is telling agencies that they should only take enforcement action against persons who willfully violate environmental laws.  It is true that the President only tells agencies to “consider” policies “consistent with law,” but I think we all know what President Trump means when he tells agencies to consider cutting regulated entities a break.

Because this provision involves the exercise of agency enforcement discretion, it will be much harder to challenge in court.  Certainly, written policies saying that an entire agency will always exercise enforcement discretion to prosecute only willful violations, even in the case of statutes that plainly provide for strict liability, might cause raised eyebrows among judges, but if the agencies actually care about the outcome and draft the policies carefully, they might well withstand judicial review.

My advice to my clients, and I mean this in all seriousness, is pretty simple.  Take steps to carefully document your good faith efforts at compliance – and keep a copy of this EO in your back pocket at all times.

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