The Biden administration’s drive to ease pollution’s burden on marginalized communities could soon be thrown into reverse, with billions of dollars in new spending on the line.
With the impending return of President-elect Donald Trump, EPA’s environmental justice and civil rights program “obviously has a huge target on its back,” Matthew Tejada, a former agency official, said in an interview.
That apparatus “is going to be under incredible duress,” said Tejada, who stepped down last December from his post as the agency’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice to join the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I don’t know to what extent any of it will survive.”
The outcome could permanently weaken enforcement of anti-discrimination requirements; it also stands to affect the handling of dozens of pending civil rights complaints.
