Trump squelches Biden’s environmental justice push

By Sean Reilly | 01/21/2025 01:58 PM EST

The president signed executive orders that upend federal efforts to address pollution’s unequal toll.

U.S. President Joe Biden gives a signing pen to EPA Administrator Michael Regan (left).

Then-President Joe Biden gives a signing pen to then-EPA Administrator Michael Regan (left) after signing an executive order that would create the White House Office of Environmental Justice, in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 21, 2023. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump sounded the death knell Monday for a historic campaign to combat pollution’s unequal toll on people of color and low-income communities.

In one executive order, Trump instructed EPA and other federal agencies to terminate environmental justice offices and positions “to the maximum extent allowed by law” as part of a broader assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

In the course of a wholesale revocation of Biden administration executive orders, he also scrapped one that unveiled the “Justice 40” initiative created to make sure that 40 percent of federal spending on climate and other programs flows to disadvantaged communities.

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The injection of DEI “into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy,” the revocation directive reads. “Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.”

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