In contrast to President Trump’s chaotic first-term transition, the second Trump administration has the chance to be disciplined when it comes into office on January 20, 2025. Some of the Biden administration’s most pernicious policies were enacted, not through Congress, but via executive orders and other non-legislative maneuvers. That means the Trump team can reverse many of those policies using the same procedures. It should do so immediately upon taking office.
Biden’s environmental-justice agenda belongs high on the list. In his first week in office, Biden signed Executive Order 14008, which committed the federal government to an array of climate-related initiatives and directed agencies to “secure environmental justice and spur economic opportunity” for “marginalized” communities. The incoming administration should issue a new EO rolling back those environmental-justice requirements and dismantling EJ departments and policies within the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.
Such a move will be met with outrage from environmentalists and the media. Like many progressive policies, “environmental justice” sounds superficially appealing to moderates. Who could be against giving minorities and the poor equal protection from pollution? And some EJ programs, such as replacing lead drinking-water pipes, address legitimate concerns. But, as I outlined in a Manhattan Institute report last year, much of Biden’s EJ agenda is a Trojan horse designed to smuggle unpopular progressive social goals into broadly supported environmental programs.
Here’s how it works: Biden’s executive order established a guideline, the Justice40 Initiative, which requires that 40 percent of the “overall benefits” of most environmental and infrastructure programs “flow to disadvantaged communities.” Under this vague mandate, a “benefit” might be defined, not as lower emissions, but as forcing contractors to hire expensive unionized labor, requiring solar energy projects to be built in poor neighborhoods, or issuing grants to community activist groups. As I wrote in my report, “Biden’s EJ agenda diverts spending and administrative resources away from traditional environmental priorities—such as reducing air and water pollution and lowering greenhouse gas emissions—and directs them toward amorphous social goals.”
While those goals might sound attractive to some, imposing the Justice40 standard on environmental projects yields smaller environmental or social benefits. In many cases, EJ policies make problems worse. By making infrastructure more expensive, EJ rules ensure that each federal dollar spent on a project yields a smaller environmental improvement. And because of their scattershot nature, EJ programs will have a paltry impact, at best, on the economies of poor communities. And yet, Biden’s EJ mandates demand that hundreds of billions in federal spending must be allocated according to these confusing, counterproductive metrics.
Moreover, Biden’s executive order and subsequent EJ rules entangle virtually every federal agency in skeins of red tape. Even the Defense Department and other agencies devoted to national security must “embed environmental justice in all aspects of their work.” Instead of focusing on their core missions, in other words, federal officials are now tasked with “stakeholder consultation,” collecting data on how programs benefit disadvantaged communities, and filing lengthy reports to the White House Office of Environmental Justice. All these requirements are sand in the wheels of government; they slow down infrastructure projects and create new opportunities for activists to file lawsuits. Ironically, some of the worst delays are hitting the very clean-energy projects the administration claims are vital to saving the planet.
For example, in 2021 Congress allocated $7.5 billion to build electric-vehicle charging stations; Biden promised 500,000 chargers would be built by 2030. But as his administration comes to an end, only a handful of stations have been built. Biden’s cumbersome environmental-justice rules—which require “meaningful public involvement” and can expose builders to lawsuits—are a key obstacle. “These requirements are screwing everything up,” one Department of Transportation staffer told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s all a mess.”
Biden’s EJ program also funnels billions in block grants to loosely supervised activist groups, some of whom dabble in radical politics. The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, tasks the EPA with distributing $3 billion in grant money for grassroots organizations. In a blistering 2023 letter to EPA administrator Michael Regan, Representatives James Comer and Pat Fallon (of the House Oversight Committee and Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, respectively) warned that one typical EJ grant program risked becoming “a slush fund for far-left organizations.” They were right.
To help distribute that bounty, the EPA turned to various educational institutions and nonprofits to help select the ultimate grant winners. One of the EPA’s key grant makers in this effort is the Berkeley, California-based Climate Justice Alliance, a consortium of far-left groups that has advised the Biden White House on EJ policy since the administration’s early days. The group espouses a radical ideology, defining its mission as working for “regenerative economic solutions and ecological justice—under a framework that challenges capitalism and both white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy.” Like others in the “climate justice” movement, CJA argues that concern for the environment requires allegiance to the full suite of left-wing causes. “The path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine,” the organization’s website asserts. The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, one of the groups affiliated with CJA, launched an illegal 2023 anti-Israel protest in the Capitol Rotunda that led to 50 arrests.
Some of the EPA grant money filtering through grassroots organizations will be used for local projects—such as weatherizing housing in poor neighborhoods—that have discernible environmental benefits. But money is fungible, and federal funds that support an activist organization’s green activities can free up resources for the group’s political activism. For example, PODER, an Austin, Texas, nonprofit that has received funding under the IRA’s Solar for All program, also sponsors protests against police patrols.
Some grants flow to groups primarily dedicated to political action. For example, last year the EPA awarded $13 million to the New Orleans-based Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and smaller awards to other groups dedicated to fighting against the petrochemical industry in the Gulf region. There’s nothing wrong with private citizens or groups rallying to stop industrial development. But why is the federal government subsidizing organizations devoted to shutting down industrial projects that, in many cases, federal regulators have already approved?
Midway through what would turn out to be the Biden’s final year in office, a Politico investigation revealed that the administration had spent less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion Congress has allocated for climate, energy, and infrastructure projects. Not for lack of trying, though. “The conveyor belt of big-dollar announcements has cranked up in recent weeks,” Politico writes, including $27 billion for a hastily conceived Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund intended to subsidize carbon-cutting projects. In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reveals that many of the “green banks” selected for funding—nonprofits including the Justice Climate Fund, Climate United, and others—were launched almost overnight. And yet these groups are being awarded grants of up to nearly $7 billion. All too predictably, the boards and leadership ranks of these organizations are stuffed with former Democratic officials and party activists. For example, Cecilia Martinez, a Biden campaign adviser who became the White House’s top environmental-justice official, sits on the board of the Coalition for Green Capital. That group won a $5 billion grant from the EPA.
Unlike Biden’s Justice40 rules, the programs showering tax dollars on NGOs and activist groups were approved by Congress in bills including the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Trump can’t unwind these with the stroke of a pen. But the administration can demand radical transparency and proctologically intrusive audits. The public must know where every dollar has gone. And the EPA administrators doling out the funds should be replaced on Day One. The new administration should also disband the White House Office of Environmental Justice and allow federal agencies to focus again on their core missions. For its part, Congress will need to begin the painful work of trimming back these monstrously bloated programs.
Trump and his team should expect intense pushback as it starts dismantling the EJ juggernaut. The media will portray each step as a betrayal of environmental values. The administration should be clear on this point: the environmental-justice paradigm—which buries green initiatives in bureaucracy and diverts money to left-wing activism—is the real enemy of environmental progress.
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