EPA Administrator Zeldin Dismantles Environmental Justice Offices and Programs

The Environmental Protection Agency’s very brief era of environmental justice is over.

Just days after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin issued a memo declaring the immediate end of all “diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental justice offices and positions,” the agency announced it will close 10 of its Environmental Justice Divisions in regions around the country.

Advocates say the moves are troubling signs of an impending rollback of government efforts to address racial disparities in environmental policy.

The sweeping cuts are the latest in Zeldin’s war against environmental justice at the EPA, which had received $3 billion for that work through President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The new policies also align with President Donald Trump’s disdain for federal initiatives that touch on racial diversity, equity and inclusion.

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But EPA efforts to specifically address disproportionate pollution in Black and brown communities ground to a halt last year, due to a red-state lawsuit challenging the EPA’s method for investigating civil rights-related pollution cases.

Both the lawsuit, filed by the state of Louisiana, and Zeldin’s memos have several parallels in how they discuss — and, critics say, fundamentally misunderstand — the role of race in environmental regulation.

Zeldin’s supporters say removing race from the agency’s work allows it to refocus on its core mission. But critics argue that Zeldin has undermined the agency’s statutory responsibility to help communities of color who have suffered disproportionate harm.

End of “Forced Discrimination”

Though Zeldin officially shut it down, the EPA’s environmental justice work had been stymied by Louisiana’s legal challenge to the agency’s use of the so-called disparate-impact standard to investigate pollution in minority communities — most notably, a Black community called “Cancer Alley.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who was then the state’s attorney general,  wrote in the suit that EPA officials “have lost sight of the agency’s actual environmental mission, and instead decided to moonlight as social justice warriors fixated on race.”

To avoid losing federal funds, he wrote, states must not only follow agency regulations but also “satisfy EPA’s increasingly warped vision of environmental justice’ and ‘equity.’”

The suit goes on to argue that, by having environmental justice standards, the EPA actually requires states to discriminate. Zeldin’s messaging has been very similar.

In a statement, Zeldin said Trump “was elected with a mandate from the American people. Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.”

“Our goal at EPA is going to be to remediate these environmental issues directly,” Zeldin said at a press conference, according to CBS News. “We’re not going to discriminate. We’re not going to make people give us a thousand questions about their background in order to qualify for support. We want everyone to qualify for support.”

But race is usually a very good indicator of where disproportionately high levels of pollution — or an outsized risk of a climate-related weather disaster — might be found. Black neighborhoods in particular are far more vulnerable to extreme weather, having dangerously high exposure to toxic emissions, or both, than white communities.

Both the Louisiana lawsuit and Zeldin’s memo suggest that race gets in the way of addressing larger environmental issues, leaving the agency hung up on the question of who is being affected.

From Bad to Worse

The EPA has taken it upon itself “to decide whether otherwise-lawful emissions are affecting the ‘right’ racial groups,” according to the lawsuit. “Put succinctly, EPA frequently does not care about the content of air and water emissions, but only the color of the skin of those proximate to them.”

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Permitting new emissions in the River Parishes in Louisiana along the Mississippi, for example, would add such an immense amount of pollution and carcinogens to Cancer Alley, which is already receiving more than its share. The same emissions in a relatively unpolluted neighborhood might not be exactly welcome, but sending it to Cancer Alley — where the pollution levels are so high it has damaged public health — would make an environmental disaster even worse..

Ironically, the environmental justice era at the EPA, which started in the Biden administration and arguably ended with the Landry suit, was never very effective.

The EPA under Biden nearly struck a deal with Louisiana that would have required that any new pollution emissions be considered within the context of how they would affect people of different socioeconomic groups. But that change was from a draft deal between the agency and state regulators, and it was scrapped after the Landry lawsuit was filed.

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