While the economy limps along, one industry is thriving: Environmental lawsuits against the federal government are moving ahead at a steady pace — and taxpayers are picking up the tab for the expensive litigation.

Fox News reports this week that left-wing environmental groups are using a little-known 1980 law called the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) to sue the federal government on a wide range of fronts and then collect millions of dollars in legal fees from the very federal agencies they are suing. Not only that but, according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the government is not even tracking in any organized fashion how much it’s paying out to these groups. For example, only 10 of 75 agencies with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior could provide the GAO with data on attorney fee reimbursements. The government agencies that do keep track of their attorney fee reimbursements signed some $44.4 million worth of checks between 2001 and 2010.

Still, we have some clues about the amounts at stake. In an August 2011 study, the GAO reported that between 2003 and 2010, the Treasury Department paid $14.2 million in attorneys’ fees just to those plaintiffs suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That means that the total for all federal agencies is in the tens of millions of dollars every year. EAJA thus serves as a hugely expensive vehicle of collusion between the government and environmental groups to advance the environmental movement’s political agenda on the taxpayer’s dime.

Ironically, the legislation that is now being exploited by powerful environmental groups seeking government payouts was initially intended to help small businesses fend off the burden of big government. In 1980, facing a chorus of complaints from the business community that government regulations were squeezing their profits, as well as an opponent in Ronald Reagan who promised to dramatically cut the government’s role in the economy, Jimmy Carter launched a panicked effort to reduce the regulatory imposition on small firms. Parallel to that effort, Congress passed several pieces of legislation designed to make it easier for small businesses to challenge the government. One was the EAJA, which ordered federal agencies to pay the legal costs of firms that successfully challenged their rulings.

The act’s original purpose was sound and indeed admirable. Small businesses and private citizens that might be deterred from bringing suit by the prospect of facing off against a phalanx of government lawyers would now have a legal incentive to forge ahead with their challenges. But the EAJA’s provisions were also extended to cover 501(c)(3) nonprofits, including environmental groups. Before long, some of the country’s most powerful environmental law firms were availing themselves of the EAJA to force the government to bend to their political agenda and pay their legal fees — sometimes as much as $750 an hour — in the process. The result was a gross perversion of the political process, paid for by the unknowing American public.

Consider one group that has sued the government under the aegis of the EAJA, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). With $88 million in annual revenue and $181 million in net assets, the NRDC can hardly be seen as a stand-in for the little guy. In fact, the group is so politically powerful that it styles itself as the “shadow EPA.” But that hasn’t stopped the NRDC from collecting government reimbursement for its litigious activities. In 2008, for instance, the NRDC filed suit to get the U.S. Navy to suspend use of mid-frequency active sonar during its training exercises, which the group claimed had a possible, if unproven, deafening effect on whales. The suit reached as high as the Supreme Court, which rejected the NRDC’s arguments in the case of Winter vs. NRDC, ruling that the evidence of environmental damage was dubious at best and that the nation’s security outweighs the need to protect whales from high-powered sonar.



That wasn’t the end of the matter, however. Notwithstanding that it is not at all the kind of small plaintiff that the act was originally intended to protect, the NRDC appealed to a district court under the EAJA for fees and costs for the work done by its outside attorneys. Claiming that its lawyers had specialized knowledge and had worked under time pressure to file their suit, the group also demanded a higher rate of compensation than the standard hourly fees provided by the EAJA. In other words, the NRDC contended that the government was not paying its lawyers enough to file suit against it. The NRDC was eventually awarded most of the reimbursement it sought.

The incestuous relationship between the government and environmental groups extends beyond litigation. In addition to subsidizing their lawsuits, the government is also a leading sponsor of these groups, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. As David Horowitz and I report in our new book, The New Leviathan, between 2008 and 2010, 247 left-wing environmental groups received almost $569 million in federal grants. During the same period, conservative and free market-friendly environmental groups also received government grants, but a comparatively piddling $728,000.

While some of this funding has come during the Obama presidency, the federal government serves as a cash cow for the environmental movement regardless of the White House occupant. For instance, the NRDC’s relentless attacks on the Bush administration’s environmental record did not stop it from receiving $2.6 million from the EPA during the first three years of the Bush presidency. Similarly, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another major environmental group, has sued the EPA numerous times over the past decade. But that hasn’t interrupted the group’s cash flow: the government has given the EDF $2.76 million in grants during that period.

The truly sad part about this legal boondoggle is that the millions in government funds frittered away on environmental litigation could have been put toward meaningful environmental protection efforts. Instead, the money has been spent enriching what is anything but an endangered species in America: trial lawyers.

Jacob Laksin is co–author, with David Horowitz, of The New Leviathan: How the left-wing money machine shapes American politics and threatens America’s future. Follow him on Twitter.