Environmental justice and EPA programs are roadkill in the House spending bill 

The Biden administration’s proposed 2024 budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a badly needed boost to efforts to rebuild the agency after years of declining resources and stagnant funding. Now, the Republican-controlled House is hellbent on bulldozing any gains and pushing the EPA backward, with a doomsday proposal to reduce the agency’s budget to a level last seen in the Ford administration.  

Over the years, the EPA’s budgetary woes have forced it to cut back on such core environmental protection functions as monitoring air pollution, inspecting facilities, measuring contamination, and taking enforcement actions against violators of environmental laws. Even last year’s modest 6 percent funding increase was too small to keep up with inflation, and less than a quarter of what the agency requested.  

This year, the House Appropriations Committee has launched an assault on EPA beyond even the wildest dreams of the Trump administration with a proposal to slash the EPA budget by a whopping 40 percent. The resulting $6.2 billion budget would be the agency’s smallest, in constant dollars, in nearly half a century.  

Adding grievous insult to crippling injury, the proposed budget also rescinds $9.1 billion from money already appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act. Those rescissions are laser-focused on two targets: climate change and environmental justice, two areas the bill literally treats as unspeakable, never using the words “climate,” or “justice” or “equity,” except to prohibit the EPA from addressing the topics.

The centerpiece of the bill is its attacks on the EPA’s core work to protect our nation’s health and environment. It cuts EPA science, critical to understanding pollution and how best to regulate it, by nearly a third. It also eviscerates EPA environmental regulatory programs by cutting funding to manage such programs nearly in half. A 40 percent cut in the account for state and tribal assistance grants brings the total carnage to a staggering $3 billion reduction in cuts to support core environmental protection activities.

Cuts of this magnitude will block the EPA from developing new programs and force massive cuts to existing programs. Pulling the plug on ongoing activities will maximize disruption of the agency’s work. It will generate regulatory uncertainty and inefficiency, eliminate the stability and clarity needed for productive regulation, and nullify previous progress made and knowledge gained. The harm from such disruptions will be particularly severe on an agency in the midst of rebuilding itself and restoring its programs and workforce. Most maddening, the cuts would barely make a dent in overall federal spending, while reducing environmental and health protections for everyone.  

The cuts will have a particular effect on staffing because roughly 28 percent of the EPA budget supports its workforce. The cuts will reverse the EPA’s progress toward restoring its workforce to levels maintained for two decades between 1992 and 2012. EPA staff implement our environmental laws to protect public health and safety and ensure compliance with those laws by working to protect the safety of our drinking water, the air we breathe, and chemicals sold to consumers; address climate change and improve protections for underserved communities, promoting resilience and sustainability; lead responses to emergencies, often exacerbated by climate change; and address new challenges such as improving methods to detect and reduce the harm caused by the extremely toxic “forever chemicals” that fall under the general heading of PFAS contamination. Cuts would either take away resources for workers to do this important work, or sacrifice resources from other programs.      

The cuts could also disrupt more specific, but no less vital ongoing EPA work to address public health threats such as the elevated levels of lead in the drinking water in Benton Harbor, Mich., a nearly 90 percent African-American community. There, the EPA’s work in coordination with the state, the city and the local drinking water system helped keep community residents safe and healthy.  

The House appropriation bill also includes harmful policy riders that will damage the agency’s ability to do its critical work. Riders nullify the Clean Water Rule, prevent greenhouse gas reporting, and block consideration of the social cost of carbon in assessing the costs and benefits of proposed actions.   

Finally, it includes a particularly insidious new effort to “cancel” the agency’s environmental justice program, evidently adopting the view that providing everyone with fair treatment and meaningful participation in environmental decision-making is too “woke” for the nation’s good. This provision broadly prohibits the agency from using appropriated funds to “implement, administer, apply, enforce or carry out” executive orders 13898 and 14091 aimed at “advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities” [emphasis added]. The orders themselves seek to “combat discrimination and advance equal opportunity.” The bill’s new provisions appear to create a sweeping prohibition of almost any conceivable action to address discrimination or promote equal opportunity provided in the two EOs.  

The House budget proposal seems carefully designed to terminate the EPA’s environmental justice work through a legislative sleight of hand and curtail much of the agency’s critical work to protect our health and the environment on which we all depend. Our nation deserves better.  

David F. Coursen is a former EPA attorney and a member of the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit organization of EPA alumni working to protect the agency’s progress toward clean air, water, land and climate protection.