The Justice Department’s environmental division is increasingly playing offense and taking states to court in the second Trump administration—a shift from its historical defensive role, the department’s head told Bloomberg Law in an interview.
“We’re bringing more litigation against states than we ever have before,” said Adam Gustafson, head of DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “And we’ve been criticized for that, but it’s really because the states are doing things that they’ve never done before.”
The new cases—which Gustafson said represent “some of our highest priority work"—are being prompted by the national energy emergency President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office, Gustafson said.
Examples of the department’s offensive cases include motions to stop New York and Vermont’s climate change Superfund laws, a complaint against a California law barring the development of certain oil and gas projects, a motion to block a Hawaii tax to offset cruise ships’ environmental impacts, and, on Monday, a complaint to block Minnesota from targeting greenhouse gas emissions through state court.
“We’re pushing back on a lot of state actions that claim to be motivated by concern about climate change,” Gustafson said.
The offensive posture is uncommon for the environmental division, which historically has spent most of its resources defending agency rulemakings and working toward settlements, according to Andrew Mergen, a 33-year ENRD veteran.
Mergen, now an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School, questioned the rational basis for the department’s stance on climate litigation.
“The feds want it both ways,” Mergen said. “They’re saying, ‘We’re not going to do anything about it, and you can’t either.’”
“It’s a strange view of federalism,” he said.
Gustafson said he doesn’t worry whether ENRD’s offensive cases are mostly against blue states, which risks creating the perception of political bias.
“We are in the business of promoting energy development for all Americans, without regard to the politics of the state they live in,” he said.
Not all of ENRD’s offensive cases have been successful. In April it lost a case that tried to curb Hawaii’s ability to sue fossil fuel companies in state court, on the grounds that the administration failed to show it suffered an injury.
Staffing Shortfalls
The department is still active in some defensive work. Two key examples include defending the EPA’s rescission of the 2009 endangerment finding—which formed the legal basis for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases—and standing behind a pending EPA definition of federal waters, Gustafson said.
Going forward, “the pace will pick up” on defensive cases, as agencies finalize more regulations, he said.
That expectation is one of the main reasons the White House recently proposed a 27.8% increase for ENRD’s funding in fiscal 2027—a $25 million boost over the current year and a restoration to the level in the last year of the Biden administration.
Separately, Gustafson confirmed several employees have left the department under the deferred resignation program or took voluntary early retirements.
“We are not at the levels we used to be at,” he said. “But this is no different from other components in the department or across the government.”
Some lawyers involved in cases against ENRD have said they’ve noticed unusual delays and a drop in settlements, possibly because the department doesn’t have the personnel to take up the work.
Gustafson said that “any time you lose a significant portion of your workforce, it requires some adjustment. So it shouldn’t be surprising to anybody that we would have to slow down on both current and new cases as we reassign folks to deal with the backlog.”
But as that backlog clears out, “we’ll see more of a return to normalcy in terms of settlements and new cases,” he said, noting there has already been an uptick in the number of cases filed and resolved.
In the meantime, the department is actively hiring and will soon be bringing new staff on board, Gustafson said. He declined to comment on whether ENRD staffers who were reportedly reassigned to work on border security and immigration enforcement early in Trump’s second term have been brought back, saying the department doesn’t comment on individual personnel matters.
New initiatives at the department include its work on a trade fraud task force, which seeks to crack down on the importation of below-market goods without paying tariffs and smugglers of prohibited items.
Relatedly, ENRD is emphasizing its membership in an interagency working group that’s working to combat the illegal trade of timber and wood products—the third biggest source of contraband, after drugs and counterfeit goods, Gustafson said.
ENRD is also involved in supporting the Make America Healthy Again project—as evidenced, Gustafson said, by an April lawsuit against the District of Columbia over the unauthorized discharge of more than 200 million gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River.
“That’s our bread and butter, those kinds of enforcement cases,” Gustafson said. “We’re prioritizing cases that have direct effect on human health and welfare.”
Alignment With EPA
Gustafson said he agreed with the EPA’s recent memo telling inspectors to prioritize ensuring compliance with federal laws when investigating regulated entities.
Some critics have said that edict tells companies the EPA will now take a hands-off approach to enforcement. But Gustafson said “the administration is aligned on the idea that the goal of environmental enforcement is to promote compliance,” and that the EPA memo matches previous guidance from Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In May 2025, for example, Blanche issued a memo saying DOJ’s criminal division “must strike an appropriate balance between the need to effectively identify, investigate, and prosecute corporate and individuals’ criminal wrongdoing while minimizing unnecessary burdens on American enterprise.”
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