On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order rolling back DEI policies across the federal bureaucracy. Moving almost as quickly, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency investigators set off a firestorm by exposing the dubious spending priorities of USAID and other federal agencies. Now the White House is starting to dismantle the Biden administration’s vast “environmental justice” apparatus. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin placed 160 employees in the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights on paid leave. The move leaves “the environmental justice program at EPA on life support,” that office’s former deputy assistant administrator, Matthew Tejada, told NPR.
While the administration’s move-fast-and-break-things approach might risk overreaching in some areas, pulling the plug on Biden’s environmental justice juggernaut is all upside. The arcane environmental justice rules enacted by the Biden White House are arguably even more damaging than DEI policies when it comes to the fair and efficient administration of federal programs. Moreover, the current environmental justice regime potentially wastes far more tax dollars than the entire USAID budget.
The environmental justice movement dates to the 1980s, when activists observed that some poor and minority communities face higher levels of pollution. Like many progressive ideas, the basic concept sounds reasonable: of course, people in poor and minority neighborhoods deserve equal protection under environmental laws. But President Biden turned the narrow goal of environmental fairness into a sweeping program to reshape federal programs along progressive lines. Soon after taking office, Biden signed Executive Order 14008, directing federal agencies to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of environmental or climate-related projects flow to disadvantaged communities.
As I outlined in a 2023 Manhattan Institute Report, “The Big Squeeze: How Biden’s Environmental Justice Agenda Hurts the Economy and the Environment,” the president’s grandiose environmental justice (EJ) mandate proved intellectually incoherent, disruptive to the smooth functioning of government, and extraordinarily wasteful. For many EJ supporters, both inside and outside the administration, the inefficiency was a feature, not a bug. They sought to redirect large portions of federal environmental spending away from traditional objectives—such as reducing air and water pollution—and toward progressive social goals. As long as federal money flowed to disadvantaged communities, unions, activist groups, and other favored constituencies, Biden appointees didn’t seem terribly concerned about tracking results. With so much cash sloshing around out of public view, it’s no surprise that much of it made its way to groups controlled by seasoned Democratic Party operatives.
In addition to the executive order, the Biden administration folded the EJ philosophy into its landmark legislative achievements: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The IRA earmarked $3 billion for the EPA to distribute in the form of grants to nonprofit groups in disadvantaged communities. The EPA’s guidelines for grant approval are so fuzzy it seems like almost any nonprofit with the words “environmental justice” or “climate justice” in its mission statement could qualify. Moreover, the EPA handed over the authority to issue and supervise grants to various subsidiary grant makers, some of which are themselves progressive activist organizations. A system like this makes oversight almost impossible. Kentucky representative James Comer and Texas representative Pat Fallon saw the problem coming. They warned EPA administrator Michael Regan in 2023 that such a grant program might serve as “a slush fund for far-left organizations.”
Biden’s EJ policies went far beyond grants to small activist groups. The president’s vaguely worded Executive Order 14008 implied that not just environmental spending but most federal projects involving energy, transportation, or other infrastructure must be subject to the 40 percent rule. Given the massive expenditures authorized by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the IRA, Biden’s EJ mandate arguably applied to hundreds of billions of dollars in spending. Moreover, the Biden administration staffed the EPA and other agencies with appointees dedicated to EJ goals and demanded that federal agencies “embed environmental justice into all aspects of their work.” Even the Pentagon was required to document its adherence to EJ principles.
In his extraordinary executive order-signing spree hours after taking office, President Trump revoked Biden’s EO 14008, along with a host of related orders. Considering how much federal spending falls under the EJ rubric, Trump’s move was a first step in streamlining—or rolling back—a wide range of programs. For example, the Department of Transportation has paused spending on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, a $5 billion plan that Biden promised would build 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030. Only about 50 stations have been built to date, making the NEVI program a notorious illustration of the Biden administration’s inefficiencies. (Predictably, many NEVI delays were caused by EJ requirements, including the demand to conduct “intentional outreach to underserved communities.”) However, given that the EV charging program was part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, it’s not obvious that the Trump administration can simply claw back congressionally approved funding. The Trump administration will surely face many legal battles concerning the limits of its executive authority in such cases.
The scope and costs of Biden’s EJ policies flew mostly under the radar for most of his administration. Only in the final months, as staffers at the EPA and other agencies rushed to push grants out the door, did key details come to light. As predicted, many EPA grants went to small progressive groups involved in local programs like checking drinking water for lead or training workers to insulate houses. Many of these groups also organize members and local youth to engage in political action. The Santa Fe-based Earth Care New Mexico, to take one example, received a $500,000 EPA grant, supports community gardens, and encourages students “to ban plastic bags and respond to the climate crisis.”
Like many such groups, Earth Care describes environmental activism as just one facet of a broader struggle. The organization’s website proclaims, “We continue to stand in solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters” against Israeli “genocide.” It also stresses the need to “defend our communities against threats . . . from ICE, law enforcement, and other oppressive institutions,” and provides a link to report sightings of immigration officials. Defenders of the EPA program might argue that groups like Earth Care received relatively small sums—but why should the federal government give any money to an organization that urges its members to subvert law enforcement?
The Minneapolis nonprofit Community Power also received a $500,000 EPA grant. It is one of many groups dedicated to building wind and solar facilities in poor communities. This concern with locally generated power is a hallmark of the EJ movement and shows how far its goals diverge from those of traditional environmentalism. The Biden administration often talked about the “climate emergency” and passed bills authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for zero-carbon energy. But Biden’s EJ programs didn’t seek the maximum reduction in carbon emissions for each dollar in federal spending—quite the opposite. The most efficient approach would locate wind and solar farms in rural areas where they can be built cheaply. But Biden’s EJ mandates instead encouraged building renewable infrastructure (typically at a higher cost) in more urban “EJ communities.”
Community Power and similar organizations see renewable energy less as a tool to lower emissions than as path to a more equitable society. “We prioritize policies that eliminate and repair historical racial, class, and wealth gaps in energy generation, distribution, and ownership,” the group states. It lobbies for changes in state law that would reduce the role of electrical utilities. In the EJ vision, electric power should instead operate on a quasi-socialist model of “community ownership, community decision-making, and community employment opportunities,” as Community Power puts it. Such fanciful notions about power generation offer, at best, a wildly inefficient path to lower emissions. Instead, they will serve to raise costs and delay the decarbonization of the power grid. Funding groups like Community Power represents a triumph of leftist ideology over pragmatism.
It’s now clear that the EPA’s $3 billion EJ grant program was a relatively small part of the administration’s effort to shower NGOs and community groups with cash under a vague environmental justice rubric. Among others, the Inflation Reduction Act established a $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), which the EPA also manages. (For comparison, NASA’s entire annual budget is roughly $25 billion.) The little-noticed program aims to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis,” while also revitalizing “communities that have historically been left behind.” As with the EPA’s environmental justice grants, the fund funnels money through large nonprofits that then select the final grant recipients, including “private-sector investors, developers, community organizations, and others” for projects such as installing solar panels in poor communities.
The GGRF also reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the environmental justice philosophy: while EJ projects pay lip service to “the climate crisis” and reducing greenhouse gases, the organizations actually distributing the money are more focused on delivering economic benefits and political power to favored groups. The Justice Climate Fund states in a press release, for example, that it was set up in 2023 specifically to distribute the EPA funds. The group says that its goal is “to ensure people and communities of color who have been historically excluded from mainstream climate finance can successfully implement proven green solutions and technologies.” One of the group’s founders says the group’s mission is “to quickly distribute as much capital as possible to institutions and organizations deeply ingrained in the work necessary to keep the most vulnerable among us safe.” The Justice Climate Fund has received $940 million from the GGRF.
Not surprisingly, the groups receiving these massive grants are typically run by Democratic Party operatives and the leaders of powerful progressive constituencies. The Climate United Fund received nearly $7 billion from the EPA. The group’s CEO is a former Obama White House staffer, while its board of directors is led by Phil Angelides, a lifelong California Democratic Party heavyweight who served as state treasurer and was the party’s 2006 nominee for governor. The board also includes a founder of the United Farm Workers union and an NAACP leader who worked as chief of staff in the House of Representatives for years and as an Obama administration official.
The Trump administration is entirely justified in trying to curtail these Biden-era programs that claim to address environmental problems while mostly distributing money throughout the progressive coalition. Demanding audits and temporary spending halts is a good start, but eventually Republicans will need to enact legislation rolling back the massive spending bills passed under Biden. Like so many progressive illusions, environmental justice appears benign at first glance but soon reveals itself as a scheme for empowering political insiders, gumming up useful government programs, and undermining genuine environmental progress. It won’t be missed.
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