Following the Trump administration’s directive, allegedly over 100 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) civil rights and environmental justice office employees are to be placed on administrative leave. This is the latest among systemic changes in the other agencies to reverse diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Federal agencies have been ordered by the Office of Personnel Management to eliminate the DEI posts. Many offices already have been closed down, and some staff have been reassigned as a result. The Veterans Affairs and Education departments have already lost their DEI-related programs and contracts.
Critics argue that these actions could cast decades of efforts on environmental disparities within marginalized communities in travesty and uncertainty. With the Biden administration sealing up everything and charging up everything in the environmental justice program, its fate now hangs in the balance. “It has an enormous target on its back,” said Matthew Tejada, a former EPA officer. “It very easily could be defunded completely.”
Additionally, aside from the reduction in staff, the current administration has taken steps to sanitize Federal websites of environmental and public health data dealing specifically with climate change and racial equity. Other tools that have already been shut down are the Environmental Justice Index and the Social Vulnerability Index, which has raised fears among researchers and advocates who regard these sites as important critical data sources.
Federal employee unions report staff feeling widespread anxiety as waves of intimidating communications threaten to close their jobs and reverse policies, all the while accredited unions will likely challenge the administration’s actions in court, using the size of these actions as much as to argue that the measures target more than civil rights-focused government work.
The scrapping of the environmental justice programs marks a stark departure from past federal efforts to address the disproportionate impact of pollution on low-income and minority communities. Whether these changes can lead to erosion or consolidation of such a commitment is not clear in the long run, while environmentalists fear this could mean a severely curtailed capacity for the federal government to impart its anti-discrimination protections in environmental decision-making.
