The number of the Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal investigators has dropped this year to 174, below the 200-agent minimum required by Congress, even as the EPA’s overall criminal enforcement budget rose nearly 25 percent over three years to $48 million, according to EPA records.

An internal memorandum from one of the agency’s top lawyers, obtained by The Associated Press, said the EPA is violating the U.S. Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990, which requires the agency to employ at least 200 criminal investigators. The agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, made up of gun- and badge-carrying agents, investigates the most serious environmental violations.

An advocacy group, Environmental Integrity Project, compared five-year averages of the Bush and Clinton administrations and found a significant decrease in the numbers of criminal pollution investigations and civil lawsuits and the amounts of fines assessed under President Bush. However, civil settlements requiring pollution control spending increased. A new investigation is looking at EPA’s criminal enforcement operations and management, including duties of criminal investigators as well agents in the separate homeland security and protective service units. It also is demanding records from EPA’s investigation of past drinking water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the Marine base in North Carolina, which ended with no prosecution. The EPA acknowledged that criminal investigators sometimes are pulled off cases to check routes and guard EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson when he travels, although an eight-person team separate from the criminal division is dedicated to his protective detail.

Source: Associated Press