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Environment • Public Administration
February 10, 2025

A Brief Look at Environmental Justice Federal Policy in the U.S.

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In the past few weeks, President Trump has followed through on his campaign promises to begin terminating climate, environmental justice, and equity-based federal funds and initiatives (among a flurry of other far-reaching, punitive executive actions). There is considerable confusion ongoing regarding which agency funds are frozen, how federal agencies should implement guidance from the White House, and even whether specific guidance documents might be unlawful – nonetheless, dramatic changes are already apparent. For example, federal staff with roles dedicated to Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion initiatives have been put on paid leave; other staff who were hired with funding from Biden-era climate legislation have been officially warned that they might soon be fired; research projects funded by the National Science Foundation are being reconsidered if they focus on topics like “equity”, “underrepresentation”, or “women”; and a large swath of agency documents and datasets dedicated to environmental justice are no longer available on federal websites.

In light of these troubling policy shifts, it is more important than ever to understand and document the nascent environmental justice policies that were in development during the Biden administration. In fact, what does it mean for a government to pursue environmental justice? How did the Biden administration define environmental justice goals and what policy tools did it implement? Here we take a very brief look at the interaction between the history of environmental justice activism in the U.S. and the federal environmental justice policies that have just been halted.

The environmental justice movement in the U.S. largely began outside of the realm of federal policy, with monumental efforts on the parts of individuals and local advocacy organizations to document, protest, and redress environmental injustices that disproportionately impacted certain communities – most often, communities of color and low-income communities – over others. These dangerous, disproportionate impacts often included: poorer air and water quality; higher exposure to toxic chemicals from industrial, agricultural, and waste management processes; less access to tree shade cover and other spaces with foliage and vegetation; and more vulnerability to extreme weather events (which are now increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change) as a result of degraded ecosystems and/or built infrastructure.

Of course, the environmental justice movement was an outgrowth of racist and discriminatory policies that led to structural inequalities. Perhaps most notably in the modern era was the practice of redlining: a discriminatory housing policy led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and a New Deal-era federal agency called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), working in concert with numerous state and local governments, banks, and insurance companies. After the creation of the FHA in 1934, the federal government began labeling certain neighborhoods as “undesirable” for loans (e.g., mortgages) and housing development – often literally highlighting Black or other minority neighborhoods in red on maps. Research on asthma rates, heat vulnerability, and more has shown that redlining – which slowly began to be dismantled with laws and legal cases of the 1960-70s (such as the 1968 Fair Housing Act)[1] – has directly contributed to many of these same neighborhoods being the most environmentally vulnerable to this day.

Redlining is only one, rather explicit, example of a discriminatory government practice that has had persistent, pernicious effects into the present that are intertwined with environmental injustices. A proactive federal government effort to overcome this unacceptable legacy, therefore, could take some or all of the following approaches[2] (and could be led by the executive, legislative, and/or judicial branches of the federal government):

  1. A distributive approach – where the government focuses on how to administer federal resources such that it prioritizes communities currently burdened by environmental injustices;
  2. A procedural approach – where the government focuses on how to ensure more equitable representation and leadership of environmentally-burdened communities in the design process of federal environmental policies and programs;
  3. A corrective approach – where the government focuses on how to specifically allocate federal resources to communities or individuals who were harmed in the past by environmental injustices committed by the federal government.

In addition to the environmental justice movement’s long-standing engagement with the legal system, there have been several federal executive branch efforts to progress environmental justice outcomes since the 1990s. These actions have typically taken the form of Executive Orders (E.O.), which are guidelines set by the White House for federal agencies to follow – at least for the duration of the presidential administration that announces them. For example, E.O. 12898 from the Clinton administration in 1994 established the first federal Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice and directed each agency to “identify and address…disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations.”

More recently, the Biden administration significantly expanded on this with E.O. 14008 (2021) and E.O. 14096 (2023), which together:

  • Provided more detailed guidance for how agencies should incorporate environmental justice concepts into their “programs, policies, and activities”;
  • Strengthened and supplemented multiple environmental justice taskforces and working groups;
  • Established a new environmental justice goal called Justice40 (whereby, for certain federal investments, “40 percent of the overall benefits [should] flow to disadvantaged communities”);
  • Created a mapping tool, the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST)[3], to identify census tracts burdened with environmental injustices.

Meanwhile, landmark national climate legislation – the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – included explicit mentions of “environmental justice” and related equity-based measures. Finally, state and city environmental justice laws have also increased substantially in recent years, including in New Jersey (where an environmental justice law was passed in 2020 and officially adopted in 2023). Notably, these rules and statutes have primarily taken a distributive justice approach, with some more informal nods toward procedural justice and few if any corrective measures.

Further research is now needed to determine if these environmental justice policy efforts bore fruit for communities during the Biden era. Scholars should also prioritize assisting with historical policy preservation so that documents and institutional knowledge can still be utilized in the coming months by supportive sub-national governments and community-based organizations, as well as by subsequent presidential administrations down the line. It is also important to keep in mind that legislative statutes, judicial decisions, and agency guidelines are government processes that are each tenacious in their own way – and while certainly not immune to erosion, they are bolstered by an engaged and informed public. It is therefore incumbent upon policy researchers to stay informed of current political tides, call out illicit policy actions, and continue to support the environmental justice movement now and into the future.

 

Melissa Tier is a doctoral researcher at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

 

References:

  1. Frank, T., Mulkern, A. C., & Picon, A. (2025). Disrupted disaster aid prompts fears of delayed recovery ‘for years’. E&E News. Online.
  2. Savage, C. (2025). Judge further blocks White House spending freeze. The New York Times. Online.
  3. Archie, A. (2025). Trump administration puts federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff on leave. NPR. Online.
  4. Friedman, L. (2025). E.P.A. tells more than 1,000 they could be fired ‘immediately’. The New York Times. Online.
  5. Johnson, C. Y., Dance, S., & Achenbach, J. (2025). Here are the words putting science in the crosshairs of Trump’s orders. The Washington Post. Online.
  6. Quinn, R. (2025). As data goes off-line under Trump, environmental researchers are uploading backups. Inside Higher Ed. Online.
  7. Taylor, D. (2014). Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. NYU Press.
  8. Gross, T. (2017). A ‘forgotten history’ of how the U.S. government segregated America. NPR. Online.
  9. Schuyler, A. J. & Wenzel, S. E. (2022). Historical redlining impacts contemporary environmental and asthma-related outcomes in Black adults. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 206(7), 824-837.
  10. Schinasi, L. H., Kanungo, C., Christman, Z., Barber, S., Tabb, L., & Headen, I. (2022). Associations between historical redlining and present-day heat vulnerability housing and land cover characteristics in Philadelphia, PA. Journal of Urban Health, 99(1), 134-145.
  11. de Goër de Herve, M., Schinko, T., & Handmer, J. (2023). Risk justice: Boosting the contribution of risk management to sustainable development. Risk Analysis, 1-15.
  12. Zimm, C., Mintz-Woo, K., Brutschin, E., Hanger-Kopp, S., Hoffmann, R., Kikstra, J. S., … & Schinko, T. (2024). Justice considerations in climate research. Nature Climate Change, 14(1), 22-30.
  13. Coolsaet, B., Agyeman, J., Kashwan, P., Rivera, D. Z., Ryder, S., Schlosberg, D., & Sultana, F. (2024). Acknowledging the historic presence of justice in climate research. Nature Climate Change, Correspondence, 1.
  14. The White House. (1994). Executive Order 12898: Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.
  15. The White House. (2021). Executive Order 14008: Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.
  16. The White House. (2023). Executive Order 14096: Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All.
  17. The Public Environmental Data Project. (2025). Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
  18. The State of New Jersey. (2024). Environmental Justice Law. Department of Environmental Protection.

 

Footnotes:

[1] This time period, coming on the tail of the civil rights movement, also saw the first meaningful increase in federal policy action to improve environmental quality, via some of the same laws and legal cases that targeted redlining.

[2] For several environmental justice typologies and contemporary academic debate on this topic, see: De Goër de Herve et al. (2023), Zimm et al. (2024), and Coolsaet et al. (2024).

[3] CEJST was removed from the White House website in late January, 2025. However, the Public Environmental Data Project has preserved the tool here.