Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Environmental Protection Agency has not been allowed to accept new civil rights complaints or issue any findings of discrimination for existing complaints, according to former and current agency staff who spoke with Sentient. These informal directives have limited the EPA’s capacity to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — a provision of the law that requires recipients of federal funding not to discriminate, whether intentionally or not. In the past, the provision has been used to challenge government-sanctioned environmental racism, including the rubber-stamping of polluting industries in neighborhoods that are majority Black, Indigenous or people of color.
These latest restrictions on civil rights investigations have coincided with more sweeping, disruptive changes hitting the EPA’s environmental justice offices, which were ordered to close on March 12th. While the agency’s civil rights office has been spared so far, its enforcement has been weakened — frustrating staffers, communities and civil rights lawyers.
“This is a moment of uncertainty. I can promise that we are committed to civil rights and environmental justice, and we will continue that fight. But I can’t say more than that at this moment because so much is in flux,” Debbie Chizewer tells Sentient. Chizewer is an attorney at Earthjustice who has represented communities in filing Title VI complaints to the EPA.
During the first few weeks of Trump’s return to the White House, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights’ management was provided with no instructions on how to proceed with their mandate to administer and investigate civil rights complaints, so they instructed staff to take the route of least resistance — pausing nearly all activities associated with civil rights oversight. For a period, the EPA’s civil rights division was under a near-total ban on external communication — including with other agencies, EPA regional staff, complainants and lawyers representing complaints, according to two sources with close knowledge of the office.
The communications freeze ended in February and the office’s staff began engaging again with complainants and lawyers, moving forward with existing investigations that had been stalled, according to the same two sources, who asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
However, as of late March, the EPA’s civil rights team was still barred from opening up new investigations, while also restricted in how it carries out these investigations. The office is not allowed to draw any conclusions, known as “findings,” based on evidence gathered over the course of its investigations. This includes findings of discrimination, a determination that an EPA funding recipient violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The office is allowed to review complaints, but if the complaint meets the criteria for opening an investigation, staff aren’t allowed to accept it, according to the same sources. For now, the complaints are languishing in the agency’s queue, with no timeline for when they will be processed. The office’s management also began meeting with, and running decisions about the complaint process by, Travis Voyles, the assistant deputy administrator of the EPA appointed by the Trump Administration.
“My fear is that they are never going to let the work proceed,” a former EPA staff member, who asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisal, tells Sentient. The source also expressed concern over how the Civil Rights Act, including Title VI, is being weaponized to threaten withholding funding from institutions that do not comply with the Trump Administration — an unprecedented use of this provision that has not once been used to withhold funding in the EPA’s history.
“Especially with this spate of actions targeting unexpected entities like law firms and universities, I can see a world where complaints against state agencies that are let’s say ‘friendly’ to the administration would be rejected but complaints against agencies that are ‘unfriendly’ to the administration might be allowed to go forward,” says the source.
The EPA’s enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — distinct from its enforcement of environmental laws — largely target local and state government-sanctioned discriminatory practices on the basis of race, color and national origin. This offers a rare legal tool for fighting a quiet, insidious form of discrimination, often called environmental racism — as communities of color tend to be disproportionately exposed to pollution and other environmental hazards. As climate change worsens, Black communities in particular are more likely to suffer from property damage, flooding, displacement and health consequences from heat and toxic exposures.
The agency has long struggled with fully enforcing this provision of the Civil Rights Act — just take a glance at where waste incinerators are located in every U.S. city, the communities in Alabama’s ‘Black Belt’ still lacking access to sanitation services, the hog farms in North Carolina that are more than four times likely to be sited in a Black community — but now the future of the agency’s Title VI enforcement is even more uncertain as the Trump Administration launches an attack on civil rights, which it tends to call DEI, across agencies.
Historically, the EPA has rarely issued findings of discrimination. Instead, the potential for a finding was used as a bargaining chip to negotiate a stronger resolution agreement, a mutual agreement outlining steps for alleged violators of Title VI — often state and local agencies that receive EPA funding — to come into compliance with the law, without any penalty.
“In many situations, having the [EPA] come in and issue findings would add pressure to the funding recipient — the state or other actor — to come to the negotiating table with a serious offer to change practices,” says Earthjustice’s Chizewer. “So having a policy that excludes that possibility could reduce the pressure on the funding recipient.”
