Yesterday, news broke that a memo from Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the EPA, directed the agency to eliminate all offices that focus on environmental justice.
These offices, part of each of EPA’s 10 regional offices, worked to solve environmental issues facing (often low-income and minority) communities that have been disproportionately burdened by pollution, such as residents of so-called Cancer Alley, those without access to clean drinking water, and people in air pollution hotspots.
Environmental justice has been a focus of the EPA for decades and, more recently, a focus of the Biden administration. Biden’s Justice40 Initiative—rescinded by President Trump in January—set a goal for the federal government to ensure that 40% of the benefits of certain federal climate, clean energy, and housing investments, including the Inflation Reduction Act, went to disadvantaged communities. Environmental justice offices at the EPA helped move this goal forward.
This week, the EPA also canceled hundreds of grants, many for environmental justice projects. Last month, the agency also froze billions of dollars in EPA funding to state and local governments and nonprofits. As a result, groups involved in environmental justice work have been forced to halt their projects. “Real people on the ground are being hurt by the stop-start situation,” Jillian Blanchard, a vice president of the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government, told Inside Climate News.
“The work of making our government more just — work that has been pursued for decades — has essentially been wiped from our federal government in a matter of weeks,” wrote Matthew Tejada, the former head of the EPA’s environmental justice program, in an op-ed for Environmental Health News.
Zeldin defended eliminating environmental justice offices in a statement to the New York Times, calling environmental justice initiatives “forced discrimination programs.”
Read more of our coverage of environmental justice on Eos.org.
This article originally appeared in Eos Magazine.
