For much of its 53-year history, the Environmental Protection Agency let civil rights complaints languish. From Flint, Michigan, to the industrial corridors of the Deep South, communities attempting to use federal civil rights law to clean up the pollution in their neighborhoods were largely met with years of silence as their cases piled up in the agency’s backlog. That changed in 2020, after a federal judge ruled that the EPA must conduct timely investigations of civil rights complaints, and staffers began looking into cases where they identified potential discrimination.
Now, a slate of red-state attorneys general are trying to stop the EPA from taking race into account at all. Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a petition with the Biden administration’s EPA last week asking the agency to stop using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to regulate pollution. Advocates described the move, spearheaded by Florida’s Ashley Moody, as an attempt to strip the EPA of an avenue for tackling environmental justice, which the agency defines as “the just treatment and meaningful involvement of a... Read more
