On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order rolling back DEI policies across the federal bureaucracy. Moving almost as quickly, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency investigators set off a firestorm by exposing the dubious spending priorities of USAID and other federal agencies. Now the White House is starting to dismantle the Biden administration’s vast “environmental justice” apparatus. Last week, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin placed 160 employees in the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights on paid leave. The move leaves “the environmental justice program at EPA on life support,” that office’s former deputy assistant administrator, Matthew Tejada, told NPR.

While the administration’s move-fast-and-break-things approach might risk overreaching in some areas, pulling the plug on Biden’s environmental justice juggernaut is all upside. The arcane environmental justice rules enacted by the Biden White House are arguably even more damaging than DEI policies when it comes to the fair and efficient administration of federal programs. Moreover, the current environmental justice regime potentially wastes far more tax dollars than the entire USAID budget.

The environmental justice movement dates to the 1980s, when activists observed that some poor and minority communities face higher levels of pollution. Like many progressive ideas, the basic concept sounds reasonable: of course, people in poor and minority neighborhoods deserve equal protection under environmental laws. But President Biden turned the narrow goal of environmental fairness into a sweeping program to reshape federal programs along progressive lines. Soon after taking office, Biden signed Executive Order 14008, directing federal agencies to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of environmental or climate-related projects flow to disadvantaged communities.

As I outlined in a 2023 Manhattan Institute Report, “The Big Squeeze: How Biden’s Environmental Justice Agenda Hurts the Economy and the Environment,” the president’s grandiose environmental justice (EJ) mandate proved intellectually incoherent, disruptive to the smooth functioning of government, and extraordinarily wasteful. For many EJ supporters, both inside and outside the administration, the inefficiency was a feature, not a bug. They sought to redirect large portions of federal environmental spending away from traditional objectives—such as reducing air and water pollution—and toward progressive social goals. As long as federal money flowed to disadvantaged communities, unions, activist groups, and other favored constituencies, Biden appointees didn’t seem terribly concerned about tracking results. With so much cash sloshing around out of public view, it’s no surprise that much of it made its way to groups controlled by seasoned Democratic Party operatives.