Environmental Justice Action Faces Tough Road Under Trump Return

Communities and advocates around the country are gearing up for what is likely going to be a vacuum of federal enforcement and environmental justice action under an incoming Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump is heralding a mass rollback of Biden administration regulations and orders, a shift that promises to gut equity work that has been priority for the last four years at the Environmental Protection Agency.

This includes Biden’s whole-of-government approach to environmental justice, which mobilized other agencies outside of the EPA to consider EJ more comprehensively in their own environmental projects and reviews.

Trump will try to unwind these policies fast, replacing them with what will be a “dramatically different approach” to environmental enforcement, according to ArentFox Schiff LLP partner J. Michael Showalter.

“Even going back to Justice40, you’re taking funding from something like 16 different agencies and saying, ‘hey, we’re going to direct it to these communities that hadn’t had as much funding in the past,’” Showalter said, referring to an initiative that funneled federal investment into environmental justice efforts in communities. “You’re absolutely not going to see that” under Trump.

As to how these programs are dismantled or what new enforcement trends will look like, Showalter said the “devil is in the details,” and we don’t have those yet outside of broad policy declarations.

And those declarations aren’t giving much hope for the survival of environmental justice projects that are currently enshrined at the EPA, such as Justice40 or the EJScreen mapping tool.

Culture Shift

Under the specter of deregulation and weakened enforcement, court watchers and environmentalists are looking to more local and legal avenues to fill the gaps.

Advocates like Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana and resident of the frontline community of Sulfur, La., promise to mobilize and empower community members on a local level to fill in the justice gaps that President-elect Trump’s pro-energy campaign will likely widen.

“In response to the potential rollbacks under the current administration, we plan to ramp up our efforts by filing more lawsuits and amplifying community power,” Ozane said in a statement.

Top state attorneys and local legislators will likely pick up the mantle too, gumming up rollbacks with lawsuits that kept Trump’s first deregulatory agenda in court for much of his time in office.

Some state officials, too, will doggedly pursue legislation that would better protect marginalized communities from what will likely be an influx of pro-industry permitting action and a de-emphasis of justice considerations under the National Environmental Policy Act—which already faces a potential limiting of its power in an impending US Supreme Court decision.

States are “already gearing up,” according to Foley Hoag LLP attorneys Basil Seggos and Sarah Main, who write that pushes like California’s upcoming legislative session and the ongoing Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative are among the state-level programs that will continue environmental protection work nationwide.

“States certainly have the power to continue to pass regulations and conduct enforcement actions in ways that are designed to remedy imbalances in environmental harms,” according to Alice Kaswan, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

Existing Template

A potential advantage on Trump’s side, though: he’s done this all before.

“They may have essentially the regulations they promulgated under the first Trump administration at hand,” Kaswan said. The unwinding process “will take some time, but they already have a template.”

The culture shift in personnel, too, will turn the tables on environmental justice priorities that were deeply set in EPA’s conscious under Biden.

While Biden made immediate moves to appoint Michael Regan—a former North Carolina official with a proven environmental justice record—Trump-pick Lee Zeldin has a nearly invisible track record on environmental issues. Regan is set to leave the EPA at the end of this month.

There will be some consistency that persists with career staffers, but Showalter noted that shifting personnel and “desk chair shuffling” will also affect more robust enforcement efforts.

“I think that you’re going to see a lot of enforcement and stuff consolidated in like, the Office of General Counsel at EPA, versus the different places they have enforcement people [currently] sitting,” Showalter said. “That’s going to have a hit on EJ.”