Fewer polluters were criminally prosecuted based on referrals from the Environmental Protection Agency this year than in any year in the past two decades, including during the George W. Bush administration.

Justice Department data collected by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) show that the feds are on pace to prosecute 88 cases that came from EPA referrals this year, compared to 182 in 2011.

The reason, former insiders say, is obvious. “The EPA is a piñata,” said Doug Parker, who left a position as head of the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division in April after working more than two decades as a special agent for the agency. “There was a material effort to downplay criminal enforcement, because they thought it would exacerbate tensions.”

For Republicans and their donor base, the need to reduce the size and scope of the EPA, if not kill it altogether, has become a top priority. The party’s 2016 platform promised to “transform the EPA into an independent bipartisan commission,” shifting responsibility for environmental regulation to the states. The political pressure has meant stagnation and reductions in the EPA’s budget, causing the agency to bleed nearly 2,000 people over the last five years. The workforce hasn’t been so small since 1989.

EPA spokesperson Nick Conger said it’s a matter of money. “The reality of budget cuts means we must be strategic in how we use our resources, which may result in doing fewer lower priority cases. This does not reflect a lessening of our commitment to enforcement, but our decision to continue to do what’s necessary to tackle the largest, highest impact cases.”

But that approach appears to fall short of the requirement in the Pollution Prosecution Act, passed under George H.W. Bush, that the EPA employ 200 criminal investigators by 1995. The agency currently has only 164. “We’ve had to close cases, because we didn’t have resources to take them,” Parker said.

