“Environmental justice” appears to be the latest Biden-era initiative on the chopping block as 168 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice and civil rights office were put on administrative leave on Thursday.

The move comes as President Trump works to purge the government of “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

The environmental justice movement, championed in part by an environmental activist, Dr. Robert Bullard, at the turn of the century, stems from the idea that low-income and minority communities who “live on the wrong side of the tracks” are disproportionately burdened by society’s environmental risks, like pollution.  

The agency’s principal deputy assistant administration, Theresa Segovia, reportedly warned employees of a potential round of layoffs during an all-staff meeting on Wednesday, referencing Mr. Trump’s day-one executive order on DEI which calls for the termination of “environmental justice offices and positions.” 

Mr. Trump described such DEI initiatives as “unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices” and accused the previous administration of “replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy.” The 47th president added: “Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” The order prompted the EPA to axe its DEI office two weeks ago. 

A former EPA environmental justice official, Chitra Kumar, who is now a managing director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described Mr. Trump’s rollback of the program as “disappointing.”  

She continued: “The EPA’s environmental justice office was created to challenge the historic pattern of pollution disproportionately affecting low-income communities and communities of color. Its work is based on robust research that identifies communities most affected by pollution. Once again, the Trump administration is sidelining both science and the nation’s most overburdened people.” 

The office first emerged in 1992 when President Bush established an EPA division dedicated to “environmental equity.” Two years later, President Clinton signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to consider environmental justice in their policies. 

President Biden upped the ante in 2022 when he merged three existing programs at the agency to form the office of environmental justice which he charged with “advancing environmental justice and civil rights.” His administration forked over $3 billion in climate and environmental justice grants through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The director of the Heritage Foundation’s center for energy, climate, and environment, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, critiques the Biden administration’s approach to environmental justice as essentially “ending projects rather than beginning them.”  

Under the direction of the EPA’s environmental justice office, Ms. Furchtgott-Roth tells the Sun, high paying roles like energy intensive manufacturing jobs were outsourced from America to other countries, including Communist China. “ When the consequences of the environmental justice movement mean fewer high paying jobs, then it’s not justice. That’s not justice for a low income worker who needs to support her family.” 

Other critics of environmental justice claim that the programs place an unwarranted focus on race. That idea was tested in a high-profile environmental justice case brought by the state of Louisiana against the EPA and the Department of Justice last year. The district judge ultimately sided with the state, decreeing that “pollution does not discriminate” and that “if a decision maker has to consider race” in its enforcement decisions, “it has indeed participated in racism.” 

Though Ms. Furchtgott-Roth views Mr. Trump’s move as a step in the right direction, she notes that she holds “the utmost sympathy” for the EPA employees who are slated to lose their jobs. “They work really hard to do what the president told them to do.  I hope that they can be reallocated to other places in the federal government,” she tells the Sun.