Our team at UCS recorded many attacks on federal advisory committees during the last Trump administration, but what we are seeing in his second term is even worse. One of the vital expert boards this administration has targeted is the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which for over 30 years provided the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advice and counsel on the science, programs and actions, and lived experience of environmental justice (EJ) communities. Environmental justice, as defined by the EPA, is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, culture, national origin, income, or educational levels, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of protective environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” NEJAC’s work brought some of the leading experts on environmental justice together to ensure that EPA policies would be equitable, effective, and reflect the real needs of at-risk communities. Now that the Trump administration has disbanded this advisory council—along with much of the EJ work of the EPA—I wanted to speak to former members and get their perspective. These people contributed time, passion, and expertise to the EPA’s mission—keeping all of us healthy and safe, no matter who we are or where we live. (Full disclosure: I’ve also worked with NEJAC.) The experts I spoke with are worried not just about the substance of their work, but about the rapid removal of ways to engage with government decision-making. They’re looking for other ways to make their voices heard.
Lessons learned from Flint to D.C.
Dr. Ben Pauli is a professor who teaches and resides in Flint, Michigan. Pauli joined the NEJAC in 2019 following his involvement in the response to the Flint water crisis, which he describes as “a paradigmatic example of environmental injustice.” Pauli hoped he could use his position as NEJAC co-chair to lift up lessons from Flint while learning from other communities with similar issues. He was also able to learn about how the EPA works and bring that back to his community.
When EPA requests information from NEJAC, the committee responds with recommendation documents drafted by smaller workgroups. Pauli served on multiple workgroups, including one tasked with writing recommendations on PFAS—toxic “forever chemicals,” which have become a major concern all over the country. Michigan was one of the first states to really look closely into PFAS contamination, and so he was able to make connections of the national issue and its impacts closer to home, including the Flint River, where PFAS was first detected in 2013. He also led a subgroup focused on municipal utilities as part of a larger water infrastructure workgroup, where he was “trying to draw lessons from experiences that we’ve had with our own local utility here in Flint, and to think about how utilities all over the country could be better served by EPA, particularly when it comes to technical assistance.” More recently Pauli served on the Cumulative Impacts (CI) and then the Title VI (Civil Rights) workgroup: “In the case of cumulative impacts, we were able to put together a pretty robust set of recommendations,” he said. “Unfortunately, the work that was being undertaken by the Title VI work group was still in process when we learned that the NEJAC was going to be dissolved. And so there’s a lot of unfinished business that I hope we find a way of carrying forward in one manner or another.”
Pauli suggested that the NEJAC was especially equipped to advise EPA on how to improve its communication around technical issues. “To me that’s been one of the really valuable things about having NEJAC around all of these years—the opportunity for EPA to hear from people…who work on how to communicate with people in EJ communities,” he said. “And to make sure that its messaging is getting across, identify what its blind spots are, and to course correct when things aren’t being received the right way.” Additionally, Pauli discussed the importance of NEJAC as a form of public participation. “We were always looking for ways of democratizing the work that the federal government does and bringing people into the process more.”
Reducing toxic exposures in children and families
Yvonka Hall, the executive director of the nationally recognized Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, joined the NEJAC in 2022. Hall’s first interaction with EPA was in submitting public comments about the lead issues in Cleveland, OH. She found that many people in the communities she serves were surprised at the lead levels in children’s blood and they wondered why there wasn’t more information shared on this issue. “We have areas where more than 40% of the children are lead poisoned, and in some kindergarten classes more than 90% are lead poisoned,” she said. “So for me, I looked at that public comment as an opportunity, and I knew that I needed to get in here and figure out how I can help.” She said people in her area needed better information to understand the risks.
Hall was a co-chair of the NEJAC Farmworkers and Pesticides Workgroup, and a member of the CI Workgroup. For her, “what was going on in the other regions was vitally important to my work, because it helped educate me and gave me a broader scope.” She infused this information into her presentations about environmental disparities all over the country. As a part of the Farmworkers and Pesticides Workgroup, she was able to advocate for farmworkers to interact directly with the workgroup and ultimately provide in-person testimony. The farmworkers shared stories about their families who had lost children and their spouses to different forms of cancer. “For me, it touched my soul, because my great, great grandfather’s obituary lists him as a ‘Negro Farmer’. He died in 1951, and I think about all of the things that he was exposed to. So I went and did some research about farmworkers and saw their life expectancy was 50 years.” She was also struck by the number of farmworker children who don’t go to school because of language barriers or the necessity to work. “All the work they’re doing is to make sure that we have food on our tables when many of them don’t have food on their own tables,” she said. “Listening to their stories about instructions not being written in a language that they understood, or mixing different chemicals together in big tubs, being told that it’s safe and later finding out it was unsafe.”
Particularly important to Hall was ensuring that small community organizations get the support they need. While most grants went to universities, much less funding made it into the hands of the on-the-ground community organizations. And since she served on the NEJAC, she was able to help advise such that the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center (TCTACs) grants were distributed equitably and effectively where they’re most needed. “For me,” she said, [NEJAC] “was an opportunity for this little girl from the southeast side of Cleveland to be able to say I had my hands in making sure that communities got funding.”
Dignity and jobs for cities
Richard Mabion is the founder of the organization Building A Sustainable Earth Community and describes himself as a “boots on the ground facilitator” for the Kansas City metropolitan region. The reason he joined the NEJAC in 2022, he says, was to help inform the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Justice40 Initiative. “My number one issue now, and has always been, getting my low-income people job training and creating workforce development,” he said. “That is what’s missing in our community that needs to be activated: people need a purpose. There needs to be dignity.” One issue that Mabion discussed with EPA leadership during his tenure on NEJAC was how low-income, community-based organizations are kicked out of the grant process when they answer the very first question: “Please provide a review of your grant history.” Many historically disinvested communities have never had a grant like this, creating a barrier to even applying. This was the work of the EPA TCTACs: to support community organizations to successfully apply for grants and to facilitate grant-based and community driven work. He also advocated for grant-funded work to include hands-on job training and workforce development–such as PFAS remediation or retrofitting homes in the inner-city for energy efficiency – which then became one of the TCTAC program’s grant categories.
Mabion participated in the Cumulative Impacts Workgroup, which discussed recommendations around existing, community-focused approaches to environmental and health issues, like “Green Zones” which have been advanced in Minneapolis and California. He was able to share his experience with how this approach fell short in Kansas City, KS. In one example, he says, a young man went through the training program and was hired by a company but later lost his job when the company lost its grant money. Mabion spoke specifically about the importance of bringing real people to tell government staff and leadership exactly what they’re dealing with, and focusing on how to turn programs intended to improve public health and the environment into something economically sustainable, “so that the people are learning and earning money as they do.”
Mabion called NEJAC a tremendous learning experience for him. He was able to bring the benefits of his experience to EPA and his region, like his connections with local businesses. He created toolkits for community members to understand how to use EPA’s maps and data tools (like EJScreen) and a presentation on climate change consciousness in the low-income community. He wants EPA to understand and respect low-income community multicultural dialogue, and to make sure that work in the inner-city can be carried out by workers from the inner-city. The cancellation of NEJAC disrupted attempts to form a workforce development workgroup.
Closing the gap between governments and their constituents
Ximena Cruz Cuevas works at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) in the Materials Management Lifecycles Program and leads that agency’s EJ work group. She started her NEJAC service at the end of 2023. She has always been passionate about environmental issues and her first job was in wetland restoration field work. Though it was physically demanding work, she dedicated herself to it because she saw value in preserving our natural resources. When she started working with the DEQ cleanup program, she would answer phone calls from community members and experienced the many disconnects between government and the people they serve. “Government agencies don’t always have coordinated ways to talk to each other,’” She said. “Rather than expecting community members to be experts on government processes, we should have a bigger responsibility to educate and ensure their concerns are resolved adequately and timely.”
Since she started her career in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, she saw the “connection between agency work and the underlying needs those protests reflected in the communities we serve.” This inspired the development of the agency EJ workgroup at the agency. “We have done some great individual projects and we’ve done great community outreach,” she said, “but at the end of the day, it’s not the norm, it’s just one-off.” She applied to NEJAC because she wanted to connect with other leaders, learn from them, and incorporate that learning into her state agency’s EJ work group.
While serving on NEJAC, she was struck by farmworkers’ stories. Her mom, who used to work in wineries in California, “told stories so similar that it just speaks to systemic issues that are persistent across the country,” she said. “The NEJAC was one way we could connect and support fixing these systemic issues.” She contributed to the Title VI workgroup, knowing that anti-discrimination is one of the foundational pillars of EJ. She valued the chance to hear from people directly involved in civil rights complaints, “because it was very obvious that the way that normal people engaged with the process was not the same way that EPA was viewing it.” Cuevas felt that it was important to be able to call out and bridge that divide. Cuevas brought lessons she learned from an engagement effort in Oregon where residents shared their priorities for the built environment. “Some of them were, as you would expect, housing and access to healthy food,” she said. “But, living wages and wealth-building opportunities were very high on the list.” Based on her NEJAC experience, she has been engaging with local community colleges on workforce development. “So, I will keep fighting this uphill battle, but unfortunately it won’t be through NEJAC.”
Tribal and rural communities speak up
Dr. Lynn Zender served on the NEJAC for a year before it was dismissed. She directs an Alaska-based non-profit, Zender Environmental Health and Research Group, that serves rural Alaska communities. She also works with the National Tribal Toxics Council–the Tribal Partnership Group for EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety—to make sure that the particular ways Tribes and rural communities are exposed to chemicals are considered when evaluating risk. She described a public in-person NEJAC meeting in Houston as “a really formative meeting for me. My biggest takeaway was, I was just so impressed with how organized it was, and [with] the background of the people serving on the NEJAC …that everyone was so dedicated to serving all the communities in the United States, [and] just the experience and the breadth of knowledge, ….I was just, I guess, utterly blown away.”
Zender brought to the NEJAC her thirty years of experience working to reduce the health disparities associated with the unique environmental health circumstances of rural communities and tribes. “In Alaska those differences are magnified, because we have such a rural population,” she said. “Access to medical care is different…the waste management infrastructure is not the same. Sometimes there is no plumbing, and inadequate housing. Since rural folks may hunt, fish, and or farm more, [rather] than getting their food predominantly from a supermarket, they have different exposures. If where they fish or farm or hunt is highly contaminated, then the family’s food source is highly contaminated. But store-bought foods come from multiple locations, some or all that may not be contaminated and that can average out. Those pieces are not really recognized at the national level–whether it’s unpaved roads, relying on unregulated well water, or kids playing in fields instead of playgrounds.
Recalling her first public NEJAC meeting, where the CI Workgroup recommendations were presented, Zender was impressed by the work but even more by the way the NEJAC workgroups were very open to comments made by other members and the shared respect for everyone’s expertise. “With that diversity of people, we were really trying to get at the truth in what we’re trying to bring communities — so everyone has an equal chance at the American life.” She valued the ability to elevate rural and tribal lifeway differences at a national level, and to know that this information would be given directly to the EPA Administrator. “It really felt important to be there.”
We can’t let this work disappear
All of these experts have something unique to contribute. It’s upsetting to hear the concerns of these smart, committed people and know that under the Trump administration, decisions will be made without their input. They, like thousands of federal employees, contractors, and advisers across the country, wanted to share their knowledge and make sure EPA was living up to its obligations. We can’t let their work disappear. Many organizations are working to preserve data and documents that the Trump administration is trying to eliminate—including NEJAC’s cumulative impacts recommendations. Even in the face of a hostile administration, we can build on the work of NEJAC by fighting for better policies at the state level and pressuring Congress to hold the administration accountable. You can join our Save Science Now campaign to be part of this effort.