The Architecture of Environmental Justice Is in Danger—and on the Ballot

Whose Movement Is It?, a series co-produced by NPQ and the Environmental Justice Oral History Project, is a call to action for those at the forefront of environmental justice decision-making, drawing on insights, hopes, and visions for the future from some of the foundational women organizers of the environmental justice movement.

In September 2024, the Department of Energy (DOE) closed on a $72.8 million loan guarantee to build a solar-powered microgrid on the tribal lands of the Viejas Band of the Kumeyaay Indians in southern California. The project, developed by a 100 percent Native-owned energy company, was designed to give the tribe energy independence, lower electricity costs, create 250 construction jobs prioritizing tribal and veteran-owned contractors, and free up savings for its fire department and cultural programs. That same year, rural communities in northern Wisconsin received $9.7 million through DOE’s Energy Improvements in Rural or Remote Areas program to build microgrids across 28 small towns, keeping fire stations and clinics running while cutting bills. And in Puerto Rico, DOE announced an $861 million loan guarantee for Project Marahu, two solar-and-storage farms in Guayama and Salinas built to power more than 43,000 homes and cut costs in some of the island’s most disadvantaged communities.

These were exactly the kinds of projects that public servants like Shalanda Baker had spent years fighting for. As the first director of DOE’s Office of Energy Justice and Equity, Baker built the Community Benefits Plan framework from the ground up—a requirement that every applicant for DOE funding show how their project would tangibly benefit the community it touched, through jobs, engagement, or investment in disadvantaged neighborhoods. By the time she left the agency, the framework was embedded in roughly $100 billion of program funding, and developers had entered into more than 250 separate community agreements on the strength of it.

Within weeks of the new administration taking office in 2025, the framework was gone. President Trump’s Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” ordered DOE, EPA, and USDA to suspend Community Benefits Plan requirements across every existing grant. Recipients were told directly that costs incurred after the notice would not be reimbursed. DOE went on to terminate grants and loans for more than 200 projects built on that framework.

The Cost of the Rollback

The consequences are concrete and specific. A children’s hospital was counting on a battery-storage grant to keep its pediatric wing running through blackouts and wildfire smoke events in Madera County, CA—a region that regularly receives failing grades from the American Lung Association for air quality. In the Indigenous Village of Tyonek, AK, the EPA had granted funding to the Tebughna Foundation to rebuild homes contaminated with asbestos and lead—funding that was frozen within weeks of being awarded. These are not isolated cases: dozens of tribes and nonprofits nationwide have seen federal awards frozen or canceled, often without a stated reason and without a missed deadline to justify it.

What one administration builds by executive order, the next can tear down by executive order, with no vote and no debate required.

This is not only a story about communities of color, though they bear its disproportionate weight. The EPA’s own regulatory impact analyses estimated that the pollution rules now being rolled back could prevent roughly 30,000 deaths and save $275 billion annually. Communities near refineries, highways, and power plants already carry the highest cumulative toxic exposure in the country, and deregulation widens that gap further. The costs of a warming, more polluted country don’t stay contained to the neighborhoods next to the smokestack.

Pulling Out the Legal Foundation

The current administration has gone further than freezing grants: it has moved to dismantle the legal basis for federal climate regulation itself. In February 2026, the EPA finalized the rescission of the 2009 Endangerment Finding—the formal determination, upheld through nearly two decades of litigation, that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act. Vehicle emissions standards, power plant rules, and methane regulations all draw their legal authority from that finding. Without it, the EPA has no clear statutory basis to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars, trucks, or power plants at all. A coalition of two dozen state attorneys general, cities, and counties has sued to block the rescission, in a case that has been consolidated with a challenge filed earlier in the year by environmental and public health groups. Whether the Endangerment Finding survives that litigation—and it may ultimately reach the Supreme Court—remains an open question.

This pattern of deregulation is not new. The Reagan administration gutted EPA enforcement capacity through budget and staff cuts in the early 1980s; the George W. Bush administration slow-walked climate science and suppressed findings from its own researchers, including NASA’s James Hansen, who reported being monitored and restricted when he tried to share his research publicly. What makes this current moment different is the legal terrain underneath it.

The only path to something more durable runs through Congress, where a rollback has to happen in public, with a representative’s name attached to the vote.

In 2024, the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision eliminated Chevron deference, the decades-old doctrine under which courts deferred to federal agencies’ scientific and technical expertise when interpreting ambiguous statutes. Agency rules now face substantially higher odds of being struck down in court than they did two years ago. Executive action—the tool every recent administration has leaned on to advance environmental protection—is no longer a durable strategy on its own. What one administration builds by executive order, the next can tear down by executive order, with no vote and no debate required.

What Can’t Be Undone Overnight

The next administration could rebuild everything described here. The one after that could dismantle it again. The only path to something more durable runs through Congress, where a rollback has to happen in public, with a representative’s name attached to the vote. Every seat in the House and a third of the Senate are on the ballot in the 2026 midterms—an opportunity to demand that the next slate of representatives treat environmental justice as legislation, not just executive discretion. Bills like the Environmental Justice for All Act would write community protections and agency accountability directly into statute, in a form no single executive order could touch overnight.

As Baker and other former civil servants have argued, the investment made in the clean energy economy over the last four years was worth making even knowing it could be unwound—it showed what was possible. The task now is to make what’s possible permanent. As voters weigh what matters to them heading into the midterms—clean air, affordable electricity, hospitals that stay open during a blackout, energy independence in an age of global instability—that calculation is, whether they name it that way or not, a vote on environmental justice.

To see where your representatives stand, the League of Conservation Voters publishes an annual National Environmental Scorecard tracking every member of Congress’s voting record on environmental and environmental justice issues.