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'Sue and Settle' Looks to Some Like Crony Democracy. Under Biden's Lawfaring Eco-Politics, It's Back.
When the Biden administration announced in 2022 that it would remove some 4 million acres of federal land in Western states from oil and gas exploration, environmental groups hailed the decision as a
The Trump administration had moved to stop the practice. In 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt issued a memo prohibiting the agency from entering into consent decrees with non-governmental actors and also began publicizing any such suit when it was filed. “The era of regulation through litigation is over,” Pruitt declared.
Those policies were rescinded by Biden’s EPA chief Michael Regan, who spent eight years as a vice president with an advocacy group involved in many such suits, the Environmental Defense Fund.
One sign of how the practice has taken off under the Biden administration is the explosion in plaintiffs’ legal fees as part of settlements – meaning taxpayers foot the bill for environmental lawsuits.
In the two years since the Biden administration lifted most of the Pruitt memo restrictions, those fees have jumped to almost $7 million, according to a January report from the fiscal watchdog group OpenTheBooks. That is nearly double the total of Trump’s four years of $3.6 million. It is also more than the $5.8 million in attorney fee payouts for suits brought under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act during Obama’s second term, OpenTheBooks found.