A web search for former President Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative” yields this result. U.S. Department of Energy, Jan. 23, 2024. Photo: The author.

Blitzkrieg

President Trump’s recent executive orders are an assault upon the framework of racial justice built since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law barred discrimination based upon race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Its protections extended to voter registration, public accommodation, schools, parks, and workplaces. Trump’s revocation of former President Biden’s environmental justice initiative (“Justice 40”) and President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 equal employment directive, are veritable licenses to discriminate. The speed and breadth of the onslaught may be described as a blitzkrieg, a “lightening war,” like that of the Nazi invasions in 1939 to ’41, except waged with executive orders, OMB spreadsheets, federal notices, impoundments, and spending freezes.

Impacts

Trump’s overturning of Executive Order 1408 was expected. It eliminated Biden’s “Justice 40 Initiative”, announced in January 2021, which aimed to direct 40 percent of certain Federal investments to disadvantaged communities impacted by pollution. Over 500 federal programs across 16 agencies were involved in dispensing Justice 40 funds – hundreds of billions of dollars – to improve water and air quality, remediate contaminated soils, prevent flooding and fires, develop clean energy systems, create sustainable transportation networks, and offer workforce training for new jobs in the green economy. Though the numbers seem large, they are not considering the scale of the crisis and the size of the disparity in pollution exposure in poor versus wealthy communities.

Unfortunately, the slow speed of the rollout – partly the consequence of delays in passage of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation (later, the scaled-down Inflation Reduction Act) — meant that the program only really got up to speed by the time of the 2024 election. Since then, federal agencies have been in a race against time to get money out the door and into the hands of communities, municipalities, states and non-profits before it’s withdrawn. Trump’s inauguration and executive order blitzkrieg stopped that advance in its tracks. To make matters worse, the recent funding freeze (now rescinded) and OMB directives (essentially, a blacklist) meant that even grants already awarded under Justice 40 may never be dispersed. An OMB memo to federal agencies requires them to report any grantees in their portfolios whose work involves immigrants, foreign aid, climate change, abortion, “gender ideology”, “equity” or “environmental justice.” The presumption is that funding for any of these purposes will be cut. (In some cases, this may constitute an unconstitutional impoundment of congressionally allocated funds.)

Some blame for the fiasco must go to the previous administration. Even if they’d tried, Biden’s team couldn’t have created a program more likely to be halted by a Republican administration. The 40 per cent number looks like – indeed is – a quota, long a bugbear of conservative politicians who decry “reverse discrimination” or “discrimination against white people.” Moreover, by deploying the term “environmental justice” in its program descriptions, Biden’s team subjected future beneficiaries to the depredations of the racists who control the party of MAGA. (They should have named the program MEGA – “Make the Environment Great Again”!) Biden painted a big bullseye on the back of the environmental justice movement, and then gave Trump the arrows.

The term “environmental justice” first gained prominence in a 1987 report from the United Church of Christ, Racial Justice Commission, and then in Robert Bullard’s book, Dumping in Dixie (1990). The idea that Black and other historically marginalized communities suffered disproportionately from pollution was at the time, uncontroversial, so little so, that President George H.W. Bush, (of Willie Horton fame), established in 1992, an Office of Environmental Justice at EPA. Two years later, President Clinton signed an executive order to broaden the initiative and develop a strategy for implementation.

The first sign that environmental justice would be segregated from the broader environmental movement was the establishment of EJ centers at several universities. The first was the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, inaugurated in 1992 at Xavier University, led by Beverly Wight. After that came more university centers and the inevitable bureaucratization and academicization: specialized jargon, advisory councils, grant programs, working groups, career guidance, conferences, guidebooks, interagency task forces, risk assessments, toolkits, blogs, training courses, strategic plans, action plans, and foundation funding. Environmental organizations big and small began to trumpet the value of environmental justice, while fencing it off from........

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