Trump Pardons Clean Air Act Violators as Administration Continues Environmental Rollbacks

Nine people convicted of disabling or tampering with vehicle-emissions controls received presidential pardons July 3, turning violations of the Clean Air Act into the latest target of the Trump administration's rollback of environmental enforcement. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump portrayed the cases not as prosecutions for pollution but as punishment for car repair. "I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!" Trump wrote. The defendants, Trump said, had been "persecuted by the Biden Administration" for "fixing their car." A White House official likewise cast the pardons as relief, saying they "relieved consumers from these regulatory burdens."

The pardons came in the same month the administration finalized a rule repealing a crucial part of the Endangered Species Act, opening habitat used by imperiled wildlife to logging, mining, housing, farming and other uses.

The nine defendants are Jonathan Achtemeier, Tim Clancy, Ryan and Wade LaLone, Joshua Davis, Matt Geouge, Barry Pierce, Aaron Rudolf, and Mackenzie Spurlock. Achtemeier pleaded guilty in 2024 to removing pollution-control software from hundreds of vehicles between 2019 and 2022. In February 2025, he was sentenced to four months in prison, one year of supervised release and a $25,000 fine. An earlier Justice Department bulletin said Achtemeier's company brought in more than $5 million in gross revenue by removing emissions-control software.

Clancy pleaded guilty in 2024 to tampering with at least 13 semitrailers operated by his logistics company. He received three years of probation and about $100,000 in fines. Ryan and Wade LaLone pleaded guilty in May 2023 to conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by remotely tuning diesel engines between 2015 and 2018. The work accounted for 70% of Ryan LaLone's business, and their company was fined $750,000.

Their convictions involved installing aftermarket defeat devices or deleting emissions-control software—practices that can increase emissions of pollutants, including nitrogen oxides and particulate matter, by dozens or hundreds of times. A prosecution study in a related large-scale conspiracy found that the tampered trucks collectively released more than 1,300 tons of excess nitrogen oxides.

The pardons relieve the defendants of remaining federal criminal penalties but do not erase the convictions. The defendants remain subject to civil liability and possible state environmental prosecutions for the same conduct. The Constitution gives the president virtually unlimited pardon power for federal crimes, and courts have historically declined to review pardon decisions based on motive or fairness.

But by pardoning an entire class of defendants convicted for the same statutory violation, the executive effectively declares that category of enforcement retroactively illegitimate, bypassing Congress and the judiciary.

In January 2026, the Justice Department announced it would no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act for tampering with onboard diagnostic devices or installing defeat devices in motor vehicles. The conduct remains illegal under federal law, but the department said it was using enforcement discretion to avoid what it calls overcriminalization. An internal memo from Acting Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche halted all pending criminal cases involving emissions tampering.

Together, the pardons and the prosecution halt mean emissions tampering will no longer be treated as a federal crime in practice, even though the statute remains on the books. The EPA's compliance office has also halted enforcement of pollution rules at energy facilities unless there is an imminent and substantial threat to human health, according to a leaked memo.

The public-health consequences are not abstract. The EPA estimates that defeat devices can add pollution equivalent to more than 121,000 additional vehicles on U.S. roads. Nitrogen oxides from mobile sources directly contribute to smog and can become secondary fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, in the atmosphere.

Exposure to nitrogen oxides is associated with airway inflammation, reduced lung function, increased asthma attacks, and more emergency-department visits and hospital admissions, including a likely contribution to childhood asthma. Fine particulate matter is associated with premature death—particularly among older people and those with heart or lung disease—as well as stroke, ischemic heart disease, lung cancer and lower respiratory infections. Children, older people, and people with pre-existing respiratory or cardiovascular conditions face the greatest risk.

Those are the harms Clean Air Act enforcement was built to prevent. Nitrogen dioxide concentrations fell 61% between 1990 and 2020, while fine particulate matter fell 41%.

The wider enforcement record points the same way. The Justice Department initiated 16 cases on the EPA's behalf in 2025, compared with 71 in the first year of the Biden administration and 75 in the first year of Trump's first term. Clean Air Act enforcement has nearly stopped: one consent decree was lodged in 2025–2026, compared with 26 in the first year of Trump's first term and 22 in the first year of the Biden administration.

In February 2026, the EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse-gas emissions under the Clean Air Act and repealed related motor-vehicle greenhouse-gas regulations. The agency formally eliminated its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in March 2025. In March 2026, it closed its Office of Research and Development.

State environmental agencies can still pursue emissions-tampering cases under state law. Civil enforcement by the EPA, or by private citizens using Clean Air Act citizen-suit provisions, also remains legally available. Congress could require enforcement or restore funding for shuttered offices, but such legislation would have to pass both chambers and receive a presidential signature or overcome a veto.

The pardons expose a structural vulnerability: decades of environmental progress rest on enforcement infrastructure that can be rapidly dismantled by an executive willing to use clemency, budget cuts and policy reversals in tandem, all without repealing the underlying statutes. When violators know they will face neither prosecution nor penalty, environmental protections become as durable as the next election.