The $2 billion settlement that Cummins made with US officials for cheating on diesel emission has caused a lot of trouble. While the company said it had “no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and did not admit wrongdoing,” it has agreed to pay the largest civil penalty in the history of the Clean Air Act for allegedly putting software or devices that defeat emissions on almost a million Ram 2500 and 3500 pickup trucks from 2013 to 2023. After the settlement and recall of 600,000 trucks were made public, I went to a press conference where top officials from the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the California Air Resources Board spoke freely. They will say that Cummins cheated very clearly. Assistant Administrator of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance David M. Uhlmann talked about the subject freely. He told me, “Cummins deserves to pay every dollar,” calling what the company did a “brazen scheme.” This is what a commander in law enforcement would say, but what counts more than what he said is how he said it. The job was given to Uhlmann by President Biden, and the US Senate approved him in July 2023. He had spent the six months before that increasing the EPA’s enforcement efforts, especially when it came to the Clean Air Act. Because of this, he is in charge of what the federal government will do to Cummins. In the last ten years, Cummins is said to have messed with the emissions systems of about a million cars. I asked Uhlmann directly what this settlement meant for the EPA’s future enforcement strategy, especially how it would focus on the car industry. “Polluters who breach the law and endanger our communities will face justice,” he stated. For more than a decade, the EPA’s enforcement program has lost money. This government has taken steps to bring it back up to speed. During the pandemic, it was especially hard to enforce environmental laws because we couldn’t do on-site checks, which are the basis of any program. “We have increased the number of on-site inspections we’re doing in the last year,” said Uhlmann. It has become more common for us to look into crimes. We’re not just pursuing more cases; we’re pursuing bigger cases with record fines, as today’s deal shows. We’ve solved more cases and gotten more money for fines. That should send a message to the whole auto business that we will not stand for the kind of illegal behavior that Cummins was doing. This goes for both companies that do aftermarket tuning and manufacturers like Cummins, which is something the EPA has been emphasizing lately. The federal government will keep looking for cases like this one in other countries, even if it won’t say which parts Cummins put in that were polluting too much. You can feel whatever way you want about the Cummins case; the EPA isn’t afraid to go further after a record-setting fine like this one. “The price will increase if it needs to in order to deter misconduct,” he stated.
