Administrative Persistence in the Face of a Hostile Regime: How the Environmental Protection Agency Can Survive the Trump Administration

Abstract

With Donald Trump's nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are serious concerns for fence-line communities seeking the help of a robust environmental regulator. Of all the actions an inimical presidential administration and its appointees might take that impact environmental justice (EJ) communities, it is inaction specifically the deprioritization of environmental oversight and enforcement that may prove most dangerous to the health of people in EJ communities. Using a principal-agent framework, this article explores how administrative agencies, such as the EPA, can persist in pursuing long-standing organizational goals in the face of potentially hostile presidential regimes. The EPA has a long-standing organizational culture that values strong environmental enforcement and we explore how career administrators in the agency have maintained these commitments under similar regimes. We offer hope, where the current presidential appointees and the president may take certain actions that will weaken enforcement and protections for EJ communities, but certain institutional dynamics will persist that prevent them from nullifying all of these protections.