Activists question whether the state would protect marginalized communities if the EPA is stripped of its watchdog powers.
By Aaron Cantú, Capital & Main
This story is produced by the award-winning journalism nonprofit Capital & Main and co-published here with permission.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of civil rights is notoriously slow, with only a few cases ever making it to the finish line — and only then after decades. But even this small protection may be extinguished if Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House.
Federal civil rights protections against policies with discriminatory impacts, invoked over the years by environmental justice activists in California, are a target in Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a future Republican administration. Though Trump has tried to distance himself from the 900-page manifesto, it was written largely by aides and confidants from his first term in office.
Project 2025 envisions a massive overhaul of the government, the possible termination of millions of government workers and an unraveling of much of the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies. Trump has railed against President Joe Biden’s climate policies, mocked clean energy and vowed to ramp up America’s commitment to fossil fuels.
Undoing environmental justice protections has been a goal of conservatives for decades. If they succeed, it would hamstring the EPA’s ability to fight discriminatory policies that have long plagued communities of color.
Proponents of environmental justice in California have turned to federal civil rights law in an effort to hold state agencies accountable. Advocates for farmworkers filed a civil rights claim in 1998 targeting the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the California agency that regulates pesticides. The EPA came down on the side of farmworkers and found that a pesticide likely threatened Latino schoolchildren. To date, that is the only successful case in the state.
Often, the EPA declines to get involved in environmental justice cases. When advocates challenged the state’s cap and trade program in 2012, they argued the program would perpetuate pollution in communities of color by allowing refineries to use credits instead of actually reducing emissions. The EPA said the claims were “speculative” since the program had yet to launch and declined to investigate.
Studies have since borne out some of those concerns. While cap and trade led to the largest overall reduction in pollution in disadvantaged communities, and narrowed the gap in healthy air quality between wealthier, whiter neighborhoods and disadvantaged communities, the latter saw comparatively less benefit since they started from a baseline of far greater pollution.
Advocates believe they now have more evidence on their side if they pursue another complaint. “The vast majority of legal wins for the environmental justice movement have come through civil rights law,” said Catherine Garoupa White, executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality coalition. “It is one of the few tools we have.”
Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson with Martin Luther King Jr. looking on, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 helped usher in the environmental justice movement. Apart from making it illegal to intentionally discriminate on the basis of race, it also prohibits policies that have the effect of discrimination based on race.
The law states that federal agencies cannot fund a state agency or pay a contractor who violates the civil rights of others, a provision known as Title VI.
Conservatives justices on the Supreme Court have argued that this expansive understanding of discrimination isn’t enumerated in the law. Instead, they’ve said it prohibits only intentional discrimination. Such a standard would likely make it harder to prove environmental justice violations, said Richard Grow, who worked for 40 years in the EPA’s San Francisco office focusing on environmental justice and civil rights.
“It is disingenuous in our current era to pretend that racism only takes place by stated intention,” said Grow. “It neglects everything we know about systemic racism.”
Starting in 2017, the Trump administration planned to weaken the EPA’s enforcement of environmental justice. Weeks before he left office, the Department of Justice sought to put in place amendments to Title VI that would have removed the government’s authority to prohibit actions that could be discriminatory, but that never happened. Project 2025 advocates restoring those amendments.
Project 2025’s authors also advocate giving a team of about 4,000 political appointees the ability to fire more than two million career federal employees, including nonpartisan scientific experts working on climate policy. (As president, Trump issued an executive order making it easier to fire civil servants. Biden revoked the order.)
Such a strategy would build on the Trump administration’s use of “ideology to drive environmental policy instead of letting science drive policy,” said Christine Todd Whitman, administrator of the EPA under President George W. Bush, in comments to the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 2019.
In Project 2025, former Trump EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara writes that a new president should do away with the Biden administration’s use of civil rights law, including Title VI enforcement. Neither Gunasekara nor the Trump camp responded to inquiries from Capital & Main.
Gunasekara specifically singles out the EPA’s Office of Research and Development as needing more oversight from political appointees specializing in management rather than science. That office produces a national report on the impacts of climate change every four years and investigates how pollution worsens health issues, among other duties.
Replacing scientists with political managers during the first Trump presidency was a strategy “to reward polluters,” said Avi Garbow, a lawyer who worked at the EPA and Department of Justice during four different administrations. “It was meant to take away protections from people, to cut the agency off at its knees.”
The Long Road to Environmental Justice in California
Although Title VI’s protection is broad, in practice the EPA has responded to complaints at a glacial pace. In the few instances it has affirmed allegations of discrimination, it has not moved to rescind funding for the offending agency, an effective way to enforce compliance.
In the lone successful case in California, a state agency was the first the EPA found to have likely violated civil rights. In a complaint filed in 1999 by the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, residents alleged that the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulations discriminated by allowing greater amounts of a toxic pesticide to be used near schools with predominantly Latino enrollments.
In 2011, California agreed to do more monitoring and reach out to impacted residents — a vastly insufficient response, the complainants said. They criticized the years-long process and narrow scope of redress, accusing the EPA of ignoring the civil rights of residents.
The EPA followed that up with its first and only formal finding of discrimination, on the last day of the Obama administration, against a state agency in Michigan that denied Black residents the opportunity to comment on a wood waste fuel plant. The EPA again declined to rescind funding to the plant operators.
After surviving the Trump administration’s attempts to gut its environmental justice office, the Biden administration’s EPA “has been the most forward leaning administration going back to Lyndon Johnson,” Grow said.
Biden combined the offices of civil rights and environmental justice into one. Its role has included dispersing $3 billion for climate and environmental justice projects from the landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
California alone is set to receive more than half a billion dollars for environmental justice-focused spending, including for zero emissions freight and cargo handling equipment in Los Angeles and energy efficient retrofits in the San Gabriel Valley and Bakersfield. Another quarter billion, from a separate fund, is marked for the California Infrastructure Economic Development Bank to develop solar programs to serve low-income residents.
But little of this money has arrived. A second Trump administration could repurpose it or even claw it back. And in its first big test of whether it would do more to enforce civil rights, Biden’s EPA blinked in the face of challenges by political conservatives.
The EPA had planned to investigate allegations of discrimination brought by clean air groups alleging Louisiana’s permitting agencies ran afoul of the law by approving a synthetic rubber plant and a plastics manufacturer in Black communities. The state’s Republican attorney general filed a lawsuit claiming that Title VI protection was illegal and accused the EPA of “dividing racial groups into favored and disfavored groups.”
The EPA dropped its investigation, but U.S. District Judge James D Cain Jr., a Trump appointee, barred it from enforcing the prohibition just the same. Environmental justice advocates nationwide are following the case to see whether the EPA appeals the ruling.
“The assault on civil protections has begun ahead of 2025,” said Brent Newell, an environmental justice lawyer in California who is tracking the case.
California has its own civil rights law prohibiting employers and state-funded programs from engaging in discriminatory practices that result in disparate impacts. The state could theoretically use its own authority to enforce such protections for environmental programs.
But Garoupa White, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition director, doubts the state of California would step up if Trump weakened civil rights protections.
“They pat us on the head and they say, ‘That’s nice, we don’t care,’ and totally dismiss what we’re saying,” Garoupa White said.
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