Daily Kos || Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "Some current EPA enforcement officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation from their bosses, say they're getting the signal to slow down enforcement cases.

'It's very discouraging,' said one official. 'We're concerned about people's health. We have a job that we're supposed to be doing and we're not doing it. And we should be.'

'It's a sign that this administration is flat-out falling down on the job,' said Dan Esty, a deputy assistant EPA administrator during the first Bush administration and now director of the Yale University Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

The statistics - examined by Lowrance and other former top EPA officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations - are the standard way the EPA measured enforcement progress.

'They measure presence. They measure whether the enforcement cop is on the beat,' Lowrance said, adding: 'And increasingly the cop is absent.'
Are we surprised? Hardly. The Bush Administration is to the environment what the Texas fire ant is to school playgrounds."

From DailyKos.