In March 2020, the Justice Department abruptly and unlawfully terminated the use of an enforcement tool that included environmentally-beneficial projects in settlements for pollution-related violations. Jeffrey Bossert Clark — Trump’s Assistant Attorney General for the Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division — unilaterally and unlawfully concluded that settlements including these tools, known as Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs), are not legally sound.

SEPs allow violators of environmental statutes to address the effects of their pollution, or to forestall future pollution, through projects that benefit communities. These projects have, for instance:

• Forced the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority’s commuter lines to switch to low-sulfur fuel, at a cost of $1 million
• Led Sterling Suffolk Racecourse to allocate over $700k to monitor local watersheds and facilitate access to marshes near Boston Harbor
• Required Clean Harbors of Braintree, Inc. to plant 800 trees in low-income and historically-disadvantaged neighborhoods following a hazardous waste incident

In prohibiting the use of Supplemental Environmental Projects, DOJ loses an effective tool for ensuring polluters contribute real-world remedies to the communities they have harmed, which are disproportionately low-income and/or communities of color. These environmental justice mechanisms have, in the past, successfully helped public schools replace unsafe drinking fountains and effectively reduced lead-exposure for low-income families.

“The Department of Justice has used supplemental environmental projects for decades to secure real-world benefits for the nation’s air and water, and the communities most affected by pollution. But Jeffrey Bossert Clark unlawfully took an axe to the use of SEPs in order to curb enforcement of federal environmental statutes.”

Travis Annatoyn, Democracy Forward Managing Senior Counsel

On behalf of the Conservation Law Foundation and the Surfrider Foundation, we sued the Department of Justice for unlawfully ending SEPs. Clark’s memorandum preventing the use of SEPs is a compendium of legal errors that fundamentally misunderstands long-standing departmental policy. Clark’s arbitrary and unreasoned legal interpretation violates the Administrative Procedure Act and should be set aside.

On February 4, 2021, President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) retracted Jeffrey Bossert Clark’s unlawful memo.