Last week, a federal judge ruled that the Environmental Protection (EPA) cannot override congress by killing $600 million in Environmental Justice (EJ) funding meant for frontline and EJ communities.
With this new ruling, the federal judge’s message was clear: Congress allocated these funds for EJ work that protects our communities, and the EPA cannot simply refuse to do the job because the administration changed. Doing so would accept environmental racism as official policy.
This isn’t just about money — it’s about power and the future of our communities. When the Trump administration terminated these grants in February, they weren’t just cutting funding. They were severing the lifelines to communities suffocating under decades of environmental racism in the forms of air pollution, lead poisoning, and more. This move essentially abandoned communities that have powered America’s economy while bearing its toxic burden.
These grants were designed to flow directly to the communities that know pollution’s grip first hand — the neighborhoods where asthma rates soar, where children can’t play outside on days when the air is heavily polluted, where environmental hazards aren’t abstractions but daily realities. What’s at stake here are hundreds of projects across multiple states, tackling lead contamination, air pollution, and environmental health crises in communities of color and low income areas.
We know that while they terminate grants for local remediation in West Virginia, oil executives get tax breaks. While they cut funding for air monitoring in Detroit, petrochemical plants expand in cancer alley. While they eliminate programs addressing pollution in Indigenous territories, they fast track pipeline permits.
The judge’s rebuke that EPA cannot “thumb its nose at Congress” shows that organized communities can stop environmental apartheid — but it also reveals how desperately we need energy democracy as part of a just transition, where those breathing the poison have power over the systems creating it. And a just transition isn’t just about clean energy — it’s about dismantling systems that sacrifice Indigenous, Black, Brown and poor communities on the altar of corporate profit.
We demand that EPA deliver these dollars to communities and ensure communities impacted by environmental hazards receive access to resources to improve their health and livelihoods.
The fight continues. Justice delayed is justice denied — but today justice prevailed.
Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).