The Beacon Blog: Consider It Briefed
President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative Could Be Better Implemented
By Erin Evans, Staff Editor for the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law
May 3, 2024
Critics of President Joe Biden’s highly-publicized Justice40 Initiative campaign to distribute federal funding to marginalized communities struggling with pollution and other negative environmental impacts say the program could be better managed. The Government Accountability Office released a report recently that found that the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative “lacked clear guidance at times and needs to assess how the effort is being implemented across agencies.” This report outlines a number of recommendations and suggestions for better management and implementation across the board.
During his first week in office, President Biden issued Executive Order 14008 “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” This Executive Order importantly established the Justice40 Initiative, which directs 40% of the overall benefits of Federal investments bookmarked for climate change initiatives—including investments in clean energy and energy efficiency; clean transit; affordable and sustainable housing; training and workforce development; remediation and reduction of pollution; and the development of clean water infrastructure—to flow to disadvantaged communities.
This vast undertaking by the Biden Administration seeks to incorporate “key practices” to “better ensure accountability, transparency, and progress toward achieving the goal of the initiative.” White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair, Brenda Mallory, has previously estimated that nearly 470 programs, worth billions of dollars in federal annual spending, are being reworked to meet the goals of this Initiative.
The Initiative has already seen some success, with over half of the Justice40 Initiative’s pilot programs responding to a recent GAO survey that found the guidance and tools useful in developing their respective plans. However, the congressional watchdog warned that the President’s office has failed to set up any type of oversight entity to manage and judge Justice40’s progress—i.e., defining goals, sharing results, and setting up a scorecard system to manage and oversee those goals and results over time.
The GAO report has made 15 recommendations to the White House to improve the overall management of the Justice40 Initiative. Currently, the President’s office has neither agreed nor disagreed with those recommendations.
Other critics claim that the White House’s environmental justice program may not shrink racial disparities regarding air pollution due in part to possible legal challenges. When the Biden Administration initially designed the program, the issue of race was omitted from the process of calculating who would benefit. The Supreme Court recently struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Many believe that this ruling could flow into federal environmental programs. “Unless carefully implemented, the program may not work as hoped and could even widen the racial gap by improving the air in whiter communities, which may also be disadvantaged in some ways, faster than in communities of color,” according to a recent peer-review study. This study compared the current trajectory in air quality improvements with two alternative scenarios in which air quality in disadvantaged communities improved at double or quadruple the overall rate. The study found that even if pollution improved faster in these broadly defined disadvantaged communities, the pollution would remain significantly worse for people of color.
According to Julian Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, “the results we have here are one piece of evidence that suggests if you don’t account for race/ethnicity, then you won’t be addressing the disparities by race/ethnicity.”
Ultimately, the Justice40 Initiative, while a valiant undertaking by the Biden Administration and its related federal agencies, still has work to do to ensure that pollution rates factor race within its calculations for federal funding to marginalized communities and to implement a better oversight system for assessing the Initiative’s programs. The jury is still out on President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative. Only time will tell whether the Initiative truly has been successful within environmental justice communities.