Project 2025 – A Gut Punch to Environmental Justice
Thank you for tuning into Environmental Protection News. Today’s feature comes from Chitra Kumar — EPN board member and former director of the Office of Policy, Partnerships, and Program Development in EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR), who warns that Project 2025 would reverse decades of progress in environmental justice by dismantling key EPA programs including the OEJECR. The proposal would gut funding, restructure the agency, and disproportionately harm vulnerable communities, undermining efforts to address environmental inequities and protect public health. Everyone should be afforded the right to clean air, land and water. - Steven Fantes, EPN Public Affairs Manager
Project 2025 – A Gut Punch to Environmental Justice
By Chitra Kumar
If Project 2025, a plan concocted under the banner of the Heritage Foundation and considered the conservative blueprint for policymaking, is implemented, you can expect decades of progress to be immediately reversed. Its intentions for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are clear. Project 2025 calls for egregious cuts and restructuring of EPA’s essential work, and completely undermines the agency’s work advancing environmental justice (EJ).
It’s important to note that EPA’s environmental justice program started out under a Republican administration in 1992. The work of the program came out of a long legacy of environmental justice activism pointing out the disproportionate and unequal treatment of low-wealth and historically marginalized communities nationwide by environmental protection statutes. Much scientific research has backed up the fact that discriminatory systems like federal mortgage lending and highway construction have contributed to environmental injustices. Similarly, environmental laws rarely take into account the multiple interacting factors that affect health outcomes where you live, work, play, learn, and pray.
For an independent agency whose mission is to protecting public health and the environment, EPA had to affirmatively make the case to address harmful conditions like lead and mercury poisoning, concentrated air pollutants exacerbating respiratory illnesses like asthma, climate change impacts and more. It had to be done not only through grants, often referenced for addressing “hot spots,” but through setting a threshold standard so no one had to suffer. Decades of work by an array of environmental justice scientists, legal experts and advocates inside and outside of government confirmed the unequal and unfair treatment of many fenceline and coastline communities.
The EPA’s environmental justice work is now conducted by staff that had previously been spread among three offices-- the Office of Environmental Justice, formerly housed within the Office of Policy; the office of External Civil Rights; and the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center, formerly within the Office of General Counsel. Under this structure, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR) has quadruple the staff of the previous programs combined, ensuring that technical staff have adequate support to build the scientific, legal and regulatory frameworks needed to undo multiple harms to disadvantaged groups.
The consolidation also enabled the program to issue massive levels of grant awards ($3 billion) provided through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to support community-driven efforts to implement solutions to pernicious multi-pollutant problems.
I worked in the Office of Environmental Justice and helped it transition from a mere 30 people into a full-fledged and elevated EPA office led by a senior political appointee who required Senate confirmation.
Project 2025 starts out with a proposal to rewind time 60+ years to the conditions that led to the creation of EPA. In the same time-period, wearing seatbelts and smoking cigarettes were mostly unregulated, even as the death toll of both racked up.
Among the first recommendations for EPA’s reorganization is the elimination of OEJECR. It proposes to move senior career managers in the senior executive service (SES) into different positions to sow confusion, and dismantle the successful organizational structure. It would repeal recently created programs established through the IRA and politicize the issuance of grants. States would be favored over nonprofits or academic institutions that were central to the IRA climate justice block grants provision.
Unsurprisingly, it also advances an overall agency budget that would slash funds from annual appropriations needed to sustain OEJECR and many other parts of EPA. Reductions and reorganization of the EPA workforce might go unnoticed by some members of the public, but Project 2025’s enactment would be felt by many, even if they don’t realize it. This includes people at the fencelines of polluting facilities who are hoping for federal enforcement and by communities counting on federal funds for cleaning up legacy pollution. In addition, the blueprint is deeply troubling for democracy. Federal government employees – historically known for serving without regard for who is in office – are now part of the political football.
Finally, let’s talk about the economic impacts of Project 2025 more generally. Clean, healthy and inclusive social and physical environments are critical for thriving businesses. Recognizing this, many states have gone further than federal regulations, making Project 2025 troublingly shortsighted.
Local economies have begun to recover and flourish through government investment over the past few years. Another pendulum swing would create instability for federal employees and contractors and the non-profit organizations that ramped up and now employ thousands of people with congressional funding. And, our most vulnerable communities will suffer the worst.
Make no mistake, for anyone concerned about the economy, the physical environment, the climate crisis, human health and the compelling need for environmental justice, Project 2025 is a serious gut punch.
About Chitra Kumar: Chitra served as the director of the Office of Policy, Partnerships, and Program Development, in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights until May 2023. In that position, she advised senior Biden administration officials and career EPA leaders on environmental justice and climate policies and programs. Over her more than 20 years with EPA she built expertise in regulatory, technical assistance, and grant programs aimed at benefiting environmentally over-burdened, underserved communities. She is now the director of the Climate & Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and serves on the board of directors for the Environmental Protection Network.
 |
|