Top Democrats are intensifying their calls for President Donald Trump to fire EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt after Kevin Chmielewski, a top political appointee at the agency who clashed with Pruitt, detailed in a recent interview a host of the administrator's ethics and spending practices that have created a crisis that continues to plague the EPA chief.

Proponents of "citizen science" research collected by non-governmental entities say EPA's rejection of two equity petitions that relied in part on such data signals the agency is refusing to accept the research, prompting them to instead focus on using data to lobby local governments to pursue projects aimed at improving the environment.

Defendants in Clean Water Act (CWA) suits over groundwater releases are scrambling to minimize the impact of recent appellate decisions upholding penalties for pollution that travels through groundwater, raising new arguments in pending cases against the novel findings on liability under the water law for contamination of groundwater.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is praising EPA's efforts to improve its influential but controversial risk analysis program, the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), and even backs supporters' efforts to keep Republicans from consolidating the program with EPA's toxics office, underscoring steps Congress took in EPA's recent budget bill.

EPA's Superfund chief has issued new guidance to the agency's regional offices that appears to ease EPA's ability to use money from its $3.2 billion site-specific "special accounts" funds in order to provide incentives for liable parties and developers to undertake cleanups at Superfund sites.

EPA is planning to launch a new rulemaking to respond to an appellate court ruling that largely vacated Obama-era rules limiting hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants that act as potent greenhouse gases, arguing the regulations do not allow the agency to easily address the ruling.

EPA is signaling that a just-launched rulemaking process could end limits on wastewater "blending" technology that treatment plants use to mix partially- and fully-treated effluent during wet-weather events like storms in order to avoid a complete overflow, ending years of litigation over whether the Clean Water Act (CWA) lets regulators ban the pratice.

Top House Republicans are expressing confidence about enacting a nationwide high-octane fuel standard as part of a broader package to "reform" or scale back the renewable fuel standard (RFS), arguing the move could satisfy a range of fuel stakeholders while also giving automakers a relatively cheap compliance option for fuel economy limits.