In 2008, Harley-Davidson started selling the Screamin' Eagle line of motorcycle tuners. The small, neon-orange box, when put on a regular motorcycle, allowed owners to “tune” the efficiency of their bikes, making them louder, faster and more powerful. But it also caused the motorcycles to emit more pollution than Environmental Protection Agency regulations allowed, and in August 2016, Harley-Davidson agreed to pay $15 million in fines and buy back all 340,000 Screamin’ Eagle tuners from consumers. Last August, under EPA director Scott Pruitt, that penalty was quietly decreased by $3 million — removing a requirement to work with the American Lung Association to mitigate pollution.

The revised Harley-Davidson settlement is just one example of how the EPA under President Donald Trump is pursuing fewer cases and smaller fines. According to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), fines collected by the EPA from polluters in 2017 summed up to less than one-half of the amount collected during the first year of the Obama administration.

Under the first year of the Trump administration, the largest penalty was a $6.5 million fine against Starkist, the world's largest supplier of tuna, for polluting Pago Pago Harbor in American Samoa. A broken pipeline in 2014 prompted investigations by the EPA.

A total of $30 million in penalties were charged by the EPA in the 12 months following Trump’s inauguration. During the same time period, the Obama administration issued $81 million in penalties, when adjusted for inflation.

Under the Obama administration, the largest penalty in the first year was $12 million against British Petroleum; $9 million under Bush against Motiva, Equilon and Shell; and $11.1 million under Clinton against Louisiana Pacific, Inc. and Kirby Forest Industries.

“We’re seeing a pretty substantial drop in the big civil enforcement actions, the ones that people read about in the paper,” said Eric Schaeffer, head of the EIP and former director of the EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement from 1997-2002.

Schaeffer resigned during the Bush administration.

Big cases against refineries, power plants, cement kilns and auto companies have declined, he said, and those contribute a lot of pollution to the environment.

Even in previous administrations, Schaeffer says that fines were inadequate.

“To me, for some of these violations, they’re never really high enough,” Schaeffer said.

The study also shows that the total number of cases against polluters pursued by the Environmental Protection Agency in the past 12 months is lower than under the Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations during the same time period. There were approximately 50 percent fewer cases than the average of the prior three administrations.