The end of the EPA’s fight to protect overpolluted communities todayheadline

The first thing Amanda Cronin did when her supervisor offered her a job at the Environmental Protection Agency was buy herself a big piece of chocolate cake. The 25-year old New York native had spent nine months searching for work in environmental advocacy with little luck, until she stumbled upon a posting for a program analyst in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, or OEJEC, based in Washington, D.C. When she joined in May 2023, the Biden Administration was in the midst of a historic push to advance environmental justice nation-wide, and the office was buzzing with the energy of a start-up company.  

“I just felt like I was part of something big and special,” Cronin recalled. 

She quickly plunged into the world of environmental justice work, helping to coordinate the EPA’s partnerships with tribes and local advocacy groups and organizing webinars to inform residents from Arizona to Alabama about federal grants they could apply for to fight the pollution in their backyards. Last November, when Donald Trump won the presidential election on a platform that promised to gut environmental regulation in the nation’s industrial corridors, Cronin knew her days in the agency could be numbered. 

Sure enough, on February 6, she along with 167 other workers in the office were placed on indefinite leave, and locked out of their federal email accounts. A week later, additional 388 staffers still in the first year of their positions in the agency were terminated. 

While on leave, Cronin filled her time with scuba diving and yoga classes and “trying to maintain a healthy balance of staying informed while also not falling into the doom scroll spiral.”

Last Tuesday, Cronin got some more bad news: the EPA would begin eliminating all environmental justice offices and positions immediately, including jobs in OEJEC and in the environmental justice offices within the EPA’s 10 regional divisions. In an internal memo, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the move was intended to move the agency into compliance with President Trump’s January 20 executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

While diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, have traditionally been understood as guiding principles for hiring and admissions within corporations and universities, the Trump administration has repeatedly conflated such initiatives with efforts to advance environmental justice, which the agency has, since 2020, defined as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, in the development and implementation of the nation’s environmental laws and policies.

“It’s ironic because our work actually aligns with the administration’s stated priorities, which is uplifting poor, working class communities,” Cronin told Grist.

Contrary to Trump’s politicized messaging that has tied the concept of environmental justice to Biden and Democrats, the EPA established OEJCR in 1992 during president George H.W. Bush’s administration to fight “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority and low-income populations.” Until recently, the office had only several dozen staffers and sat within the agency’s Office of Policy. In 2022, former EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced that OEJCR would be turned into a national program office on par with the Office of Air and Radiation or the Office of Water, and that its staff size would grow to 200 personnel. The decision was “transformative,” said Margot Brown, the senior vice president of environmental justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“It elevated the need to ensure that every American has clean air, clean water, and safe land to live on,” she explained. “It made it a national priority.” The EPA Administrator meets weekly with the heads of all the agency’s national programs, she continued, meaning that the OEJCR now had direct and routine access to the EPA’s top decision makers. 

Another former environmental justice staffer, whom we’ll call Tracy, joined the EPA during OEJCR’s hiring blitz and was also fired after Trump took office. (She asked that her true name be withheld for fear of affecting her future employment prospects in the agency.) Her job was to help manage cooperative agreements, a term for a special kind of grant issued with substantial government involvement. 

“It was a dream job,” she told Grist in a phone call. “It allowed me to gain more experience in my area of expertise, a wider reach.” 

Tracy described an energetic work environment with people from a variety of backgrounds and skill sets who had uprooted their jobs and lives in other parts of the country to be part of the Biden Administration’s push for environmental justice. The team of grant makers she was on worked with historically disadvantaged communities to implement environmental justice programs. 

“We told them that we would do things differently this time, that we would right the wrongs of the past,” Tracy said of the office’s grantees. “We worked really hard to build their trust.”

Tracy scoffed at president Trump and Zeldin’s claims that their office had wasted federal dollars on DEI initiatives. “We don’t just give the money and say come back and see us in 6 months,” she said. “We’re meeting with them every step of the way.”

The news of the imminent closure of the EPA’s environmental justice offices came just one day before Zeldin’s announcement of the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history,” aimed at gutting federal oversight of the automobile and oil and gas industries. The EPA intends to eliminate dozens of environmental regulations, including rules governing petroleum refineries and climate-warming emissions. Also last week, Zeldin terminated $20 billion in Biden climate grants, many of which were designated for underserved communities. Altogether, the actions of last week trammel Biden-era efforts to fight over-pollution in the nation’s industrial corridors and put millions of people at risk of increased exposure to toxic air and water.

Last Thursday, two federal judges, one in Maryland and another in California, found the Trump administration’s firing sprees to be unlawful and ordered that thousands of federal employees be reinstated. On Sunday, Tracy received an email from the EPA informing her that her termination had been rescinded; she is now on administrative leave until further notice. The news offered some relief, she said, but not much. She believes her position will be on the chopping block next. 

“You know those brownfields?” Tracy asked, referring to toxic sites where former industrial plants once operated. “The oil companies get to disband and go operate somewhere else. But what about the communities next to those places? What’s going to happen to them?”