The Problem of Accountability: Environmental Justice and the Trump Administration

Introduction

Since President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order (EO) 12898 in 1994, the focus on and framing of environmental justice (EJ) within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ebbed and flowed. The EO charged EPA with integrating EJ across the U.S. government. ¹ This was co-ordinated through the Office of EJ, which was established as the Office of Environmental Equity in 1993 but changed its name in 1994. Since the institutionalization of EJ within EPA, various tools have been used to support EJ work, including the establishment of the National EJ Advisory Committee (NEJAC) in 1993, the development of the EJ small grants program in 1994, and the EJ Interagency Working Group in 1995. ² Controversially, the Trump administration relocated the Office of EJ from the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, where it had been housed since its inception, to the Office of Policy, a move many saw as a politicization of the office. ³ Despite nearly three decades of attention to EJ within EPA, black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities still bear a disproportionate impact of environmental harms. ⁴

Academics, activists, and EPA employees have suggested changes that need to occur so EJ goals can be achieved. Among these recommendations is a call for the development of systems of accountability to track EPA's EJ work. ⁵ In this article, we draw on >100 interviews with EPA employees to investigate the tensions between the lack of sufficient formal integrated top-down accountability with the informal middle-out systems of accountability EPA employees have developed coupled with bottom-up accountability to maintain EJ work during an administration hostile to this work. To begin, we situate this research within EPA's approach to EJ with a focus on accountability. Then through interview data, we examine how systems of accountability helped and hindered EJ work during the Trump administration. In conclusion, we reflect on the ways EPA employees suggest systems of accountability be implemented into EPA, and the challenges that exist for these developments.

Environmental Justice and the EPA

The marginalized space EJ has occupied at EPA was exacerbated during the Trump administration. The administration's rhetoric, and their rollback of environmental regulations, disproportionately impacted BIPOC and low-income communities. ⁶ The implementation of environmental policies were pushed to the states, but waivers for states to be more stringent than federal guidelines dictate were routinely denied. ⁷ Despite these pressures on the EPA from the Trump Administration, past administrations are a reminder that EJ has never been fully prioritized through funding and allocation of resources, instead it has run through the dedication of EPA staff. ⁸

EJ work within EPA cannot be considered, nor understood, without addressing the overall culture of EPA. Harrison found that within EPA, despite the acceptance of the existence of environmental injustices, there are staff members who felt that addressing EJ was beyond the purview of EPA, many instead clinging to a racially color-blind approach to environmental protection. ⁹ This she argues undermines the ability of those within the agency to address EJ concerns. Moreover, EPA's EJ work is not carried out in a vacuum, instead, the context of the United States influences EPA's culture, priorities, and community engagement. Critical EJ scholars and activists advocate for connections between structural systems of oppression and environmental injustices, contending that environmental injustices will not be remedied until systemic oppressions are addressed. ¹⁰

One challenge to addressing environmental injustices and assessing the success of EJ programs within EPA are insufficient systems of accountability. Accountability can be seen as both external actors holding an institution to account for their delegated responsibilities and systems enacted within an institution to measure and monitor the success and failures of the institution. ¹¹ We draw on social movement theory to define top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out forms of accountability. ¹²

In the context of EPA, top-down accountability, often spoken of as internal systems of accountability, comes from congressional mandates and EOs. There are no congressional mandates related to EJ, and although there is an EO, it is at the whim of the administration and, significantly for EJ, not tied to specific actions. ¹³ Top-down accountability provides performance-based management systems, collect and report data on patterns and trends, and create systems by which EPA employees, states, and other federal agencies are held accountable for these actions and goals. ¹⁴ This leads to a situation where EPA is charged with addressing environmental injustices across the government but are not told how to do it, the specific goals they must achieve nor how to measure success.

Despite the lack of top-down accountability, there has been progress on EJ at EPA. To advance it, EPA employees have relied on other tactics, specifically middle-out tactics. Middle-out tactics, which most often refer to the mobilization of resources and expertise to serve the needs of institutions and communities, is characterized by information sharing and a commitment to use available resources to solve specific problems. ¹⁵ Within EPA, middle-out tactics manifest themselves through community engagement, within EPA itself, and in their relationship with executive and legislative branches (Fig. 1). Community engagement occurs through outreach, grants programs, and training programs. In relationship to the legislative and executive branches, middle-out tactics include the participation in the regulatory process. ¹⁶

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FIG. 1.

Processes and mechanisms through which the EPA engages with environmental justice through bottom-up, middle-out, and top-down interactions. EJ, environmental justice; EPA, Environmental Protection Agency.

In this article, we highlight how middle-out tactics within EPA were used by EPA employees to continue their EJ work despite Trump administration attacks. They often work within the confines of the top-down mandates to meet EJ goals and the bottom-up demands. ¹⁷ One way middle-out systems of accountability manifested themselves is the integration of EJ into bureaucratic processes. Through NEJAC, community EJ grants, trainings, and other programs, EJ has been woven within EPA's culture, but as we discuss below, lack of funding, staffing, and standards makes it challenging, but not impossible, to create material changes in EJ communities. ¹⁸ By integrating EJ into bureaucratic processes, EPA employees guarantee systems will continue, but not necessarily that systems produce desired results. Middle-out systems of accountability can also put pressure on administrators to create top-down systems of accountability and on communities to meet EPA targets.

Bottom-up systems of accountability have been a driving force in EPA's EJ work. EO 12898 was the result of a co-ordinated effort by activists for EPA to take EJ concerns seriously. Bottom-up accountability can represent systems that are negotiated between the government and stakeholders or the ways stakeholders pressure the government to either uphold their commitments, fulfill legal obligations, or develop internal systems of accountability. ¹⁹ Within EPA, bottom-up accountability can be seen in the lobbying, protesting, and advocating done by communities and nongovernmental organizations for EPA to address EJ concerns.

We argue the lack of top-down accountability within EPA facilitated the Trump administration's attempts to dismantle EPA's EJ work, but middle-out accountability, established by career employees before the Trump administration, coupled with bottom-up pressure from external actors, worked together to maintain some of EPA's EJ work. The development of top-down systems of accountability with specific goals and targets would contribute to the resilience of EPA's EJ program and provide ways for external actors to hold EPA to account.

Methods

This article is based on >100 interviews with >75 former and current EPA employees conducted by a team of researchers affiliated with the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) ²⁰ between December 2016 and December 2020. The interviews were conducted with current employees and retirees from EPA Headquarters and regional offices. Length of employment at EPA ranged from 3 to 41 years with the majority employed for 10 or more years. All but four of our interviewees were career appointees. Of the sample, 21 retired during the Trump administration and 26 were still employed at EPA at the time of interview, the remainder were retired before the Trump administration.

Professional training included environmental science and other scientific disciplines, political science, engineering, medicine, economics, law, public policy, and administration. Interviewees served as EPA scientists, administrators, lawyers, regulatory analysts, community liaisons, and economists. Headquarters divisions and programs represented by our interviewees include Enforcement and Compliance, Research and Development, Children's Health, EJ, Criminal Enforcement, Air, Drinking Water, Environmental Information, and Superfund. The sample also includes employees from all EPA regions except for 4, 6, and 7. In reporting our results, we do not include information on interviewee office affiliation, to protect confidentiality.

The semistructured interviews were conducted as part of a broader EDGI research project to document the impact of the Trump administration on environmental data and governance. ²⁰ The interviews addressed themes of employees' background and job responsibilities, experiences at EPA before, and if applicable, during the Trump administration, and suggestions for changes at EPA. Interviewees were identified through [organization] researchers' professional contacts and through the snowball method. All interviews were transcribed and then coded using Dedoose, an online collaborative qualitative data management system.

The findings presented in this study are from codes that we identified as most relevant to our research questions: pre- and post-Trump EJ, threats to achievements, and suggestions for improving EPA. We paid particular attention to codes that had a co-occurrence with the codes for pre- or post-Trump EJ. Although these codes do not represent all of the output represented in this article, it does represent the majority. This research project is approved by the Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) of Northeastern University and Stony Brook University under a multisite agreement with the IRBs of other participating institutions.

Trump Administration

Without strong top-down systems of accountability, agency leadership becomes critical to advancing EJ goals. The agency leaders Trump appointed, however, played a significant role in weakening the emphasis on EJ in the agency. Starting during the transition, the administration made clear that it would not follow ethics rules that help ensure political appointees are accountable to the public they serve.

Trump's EPA appointees were notable for their relationships with regulated industries (e.g., fossil fuels, chemical, and agricultural), and many were issued ethics waivers allowing them to work on issues where they may have had conflicts of interest. ²¹ This had a significant impact on EJ since it greatly facilitated the administration's deregulatory agenda, likely disproportionately impacting BIPOC communities. ²² As one interviewee explained, “to the extent that rule-making during the last administration [Obama] was affirmative and working to expand pollution control requirements and ratchet down on emissions and protecting health and the environment, the fact that much if not all of the current efforts [Trump] are working in the opposite direction kinda speaks for itself.” (SMCM-001)

Furthermore, Trump political appointees were mostly white ²³ and some interviewees thought they lacked understanding and prioritization of EJ issues. “There is not one person of any diversity that has showed up in their entourage. No one.” (SBU-029) These characteristics of EPA's new leadership set the stage for undermining EJ throughout the administration. As one person said: “My sense of what's happened to the Office of EJ… is a real hollowing out. I mean they kept the structure nominally in place and there's lip service to the goals but the personnel aren't really there the way that they were and the backing of the administrator is not focused on using these ideas…of protecting vulnerable communities as a way to galvanize transformative moments.” (SBUa-066)

The Trump administration targeted EPA's EJ work through proposed budgetary cuts, a strategy mitigated by external congressional and public pressure. When the President released his first budget proposal in March of 2017 (FY 2018), which zeroed out funding for EJ (including the Office of EJ, the NEJAC, the Interagency Working Group, the grants program, EJ as part of Superfund, and other community EJ work), staff and advocates feared the program would be eliminated. Around the same time, Mustafa Ali, the Assistant Associate Administrator for EJ, a nationally recognized leader, publicly resigned from the agency, while urging the Trump administration to protect vulnerable communities from environmental pollution. ²⁴

Ali's resignation and the deep proposed EPA budget cuts received significant press attention and pushback from advocates. ²⁵ Even though Republicans controlled both the House and Senate, Congress did not approve the program's elimination; in subsequent years, Presidential budget requests included funding for EPA's EJ program. ²⁶ After 2018, Presidential EJ-related budget requests ranged from $2 to $2.7 million, down from a high of $15.2 million requested in President Obama's FY 2017 proposal. However, Congress maintained annual funding for EJ of between $6.7 and $9.5 million from 2017 through 2020.

After Democrats took control of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections, at least three House Committees held hearings on EJ. ²⁷ It is likely that strong pushback from EJ leaders and environmental advocates held Congress accountable and helped to keep the program funded throughout the administration. They realized that eliminating the EJ program would not be worth the political cost. As one person said, “EJ is small change. You know, why get a bunch of black people angry about their office going under by the administration when there are much bigger things, there are much bigger fish for the administrator to fry at EPA.” (WC-07)

In the absence of executive support for EJ, career staff held themselves accountable for advancing the work within the challenging political context of the Trump administration. To avoid pushback, however, they steered clear of potentially controversial issues such as climate justice: “I still go out to the communities, I still work with grantees, I still do outreach. We're not talking about regulation right now, we're not talking about climate change or climate justice. I could not organize a panel to come to EPA from community members talking about climate justice right now. That would not be allowed.” (WC-07) This self-censorship was seen by some as seriously impeding EJ work. Moreover, some staff retreated from their work to a greater extent: “Nothing happened in the past year under Trump. I saw my fellow bureaucrats sort of withdraw, so they'd say, ‘Well, we could bring a case against so and so, but why bother? It's so much work and they're never going to let us do it.’” (SBU-057)

Some contextualized the minimal progress made under the administration in terms of long-standing problems with EJ at the agency, including difficulty integrating it across EPA programs and producing tangible outcomes. These interviewees suggested that the Trump administration essentially maintained the status quo in which EJ continued to occupy a “marginal” status: “where we are is… a notable variation from where we usually are, but it's not significantly different…at least in terms of full time equivalents and expectations of the EJ program.” (WC-07)

Some noted that the lack of progress has spanned administrations and persisted regardless of its location within the agency: “You know, I have personally been very disappointed in the office wherever it's been. As far as I can tell it's not moved the agenda forward. Now I don't know the details and it might have moved in some very important ways, but it looks to me to be window dressing” (SBU-078). Still another noted that even though the program has been in existence for 25 years, the agency has not taken “the most basic steps to provide access to vulnerable communities” and pointed to EPA's Puerto Rico website, which is in English. (SBU-066)

The basis for some of these criticisms may lie in the agency's difficulty creating top-down accountability mechanisms. ²⁸ Under the Obama administration, EPA leadership worked to improve this; however, these efforts appear to have been abandoned under the Trump administration. One example is the EJ 2020 Action Agenda, finalized in 2016—a strategic plan with three overarching goals—improving health, developing partnerships, and making “progress on significant EJ challenges.” ²⁹ Specific priorities include lead, drinking water, air quality, and hazardous waste sites, as well as improving enforcement in overburdened communities. Some interviewees saw this as a significant step toward internal accountability, even though the EPA Office of Inspector General criticized the plan for lacking specific accountability measures. ³⁰ In addition, the agency committed to annual reports of progress, but the EPA's annual EJ progress reports for FY 2018 and 2019 do not discuss progress toward EJ 2020's goals, nor does the EJ 2020 web page. ³¹

In summary, our interviews paint a picture of the EPA's EJ program as being particularly vulnerable to weakening under hostile administrations, such as the Trump administration, due to inadequate systems of accountability and over-reliance on prioritization by agency leadership to make progress. Despite this, the program's internal infrastructure remained intact because of the work of career staff and congressional and public pushback on the administration's most extreme proposals. That said, interviewees were also cognizant that the administration's more significant impact was worsening or continuation of unacceptable status quo environmental conditions in BIPOC communities due to declining enforcement and regulatory rollbacks. Pointing to declining Resource Conservation and Recovery Act inspections, which help to ensure proper disposal of hazardous waste, one person said: “that's your EJ issues” while another referred to the abandoned Clean Power Plan, the “single greatest attempt to improve air quality in poor communities of color.” (SBU-066)

Strengthening Accountability Within EPA

In this article, we demonstrate that despite the lack of top-down accountability, EPA's EJ program was able to survive attacks from the Trump administration through middle-out and bottom-up accountability. Despite the fact that EJ was able to survive, we contend that for it to thrive within EPA there needs to be top-down systems of accountability and the strengthening of middle-out and bottom-up systems of accountability.

We recognize that the development of these systems does not guarantee the success of EJ within EPA since there is often a difference between how accountability is imagined and enacted. ³² This results from differential power structures, actors included or excluded from processes, how practices of accountability are “socially constituted and contested,” and whether accountability is seen as an end point or a means to an end. ^{33 , 34} Moreover, as discussed in the literature review, since EJ work is inextricable from external systems of oppression, which are manifested within EPA in different ways, these systems must be accounted for on a national level. ³⁵

A federal law would begin to establish systems of accountability. This represents a top-down management approach that would provide structure within which performance-based management systems could be developed. Moreover, because EPA is a regulatory agency, federal legislation would create formalized middle-out engagement between EPA employees and the legislative branch. A federal law does not guarantee adequate enforcement, which could be seen in the rollbacks in enforcement of the Clean Air and Clean Water Act during the Trump administration. ³⁶ The passage of EJ legislation, however, could provide tools through which communities and employees can pursue bottom-up and middle-out accountability.

As we have demonstrated, middle-out and bottom-up systems of accountability played an important role in the maintenance of EJ within EPA. The ways employees were able to use resistance, bureaucratic integration, and program continuation, when coupled with bottom-up pressure on both EPA and the congressional branch through lobbying, program participation, protests, lobbying, and voting provided the inertia necessary for the survival of EJ. Some ways that our interviewees suggested strengthening middle-out accountability was through the integration of EJ goals into performance evaluations; buy-in from senior officials, and appointment of EJ senior staff (both career and political) across all government agencies, not just EPA. Bottom-up systems of accountability can be strengthened by developing mechanisms where communities are not only able to voice their opinions, but those opinions are listened to, valued, and incorporated into policy decisions.

The strengthening of systems of accountability will not solve environmental injustices in the United States, this will require a broader reevaluation of our systems of racial capital and value hierarchy. ³⁷ Moreover, it is critical to remember that EJ communities were disproportionately harmed by regulatory rollbacks and declines in enforcement, even in instances where there were top-down systems of accountability.

Despite these challenges, top-down systems of accountability provide community members with tools to continue to push EPA to address EJ concerns and allows them to use the legal systems to force compliance. Moreover, middle-out systems can support top-down systems of accountability and provide other mechanisms for EJ to be given full priority within EPA. The challenge going forward is what systems of accountability can be established that ensure that laws are equally enforced by the EPA across EJ communities even when this is not a priority for an administration. Accountability is not a means to an end, instead, it is one of many steps that must be taken for EJ to be prioritized within EPA.