For more than a decade, Matthew Tejada was at the forefront of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice efforts. 

Originally hired by the Obama administration to lead environmental justice efforts as the director of the Office of Environmental Justice, he later became deputy assistant administrator and helped launch the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights created under the Biden administration. Before leaving the agency at the end of 2023, Tejada worked to integrate environmental justice into EPA’s regulatory and enforcement work, ensuring that historically underserved communities—those disproportionately burdened by pollution—had a voice in federal policy decisions.

Under President Joe Biden, environmental justice initiatives received an unprecedented resource injection, with billions of dollars allocated in community grants, technical assistance programs and infrastructure improvements. But Tejada, who was involved in setting up institutional mechanisms to roll out funding for the underserved communities across the United States, now watches with growing concern as those gains are being rolled back by the agency’s current leadership. The new management, he says, is dismantling years of progress, cutting funding and abandoning efforts to engage vulnerable communities in decision-making processes.

In a conversation with Inside Climate News, Tejada reflected on his time at the EPA, the evolution of environmental justice under various administrations and what the unraveling of these initiatives means for communities that have long endured environmental neglect.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AMAN AZHAR: You led the EPA’s environmental justice efforts for more than a decade. How did the program evolve over time?

MATTHEW TEJADA: When I arrived at the EPA, the agency’s approach to environmental justice was essentially an afterthought. The Office of Environmental Justice existed, but its role was marginal. When Lisa Jackson became President Obama’s first EPA administrator, she made environmental justice one of her top five priorities. She wanted to shift the paradigm so that environmental justice wasn’t just something a small office handled—it had to be part of the entire agency’s mission.

She asked, “What do you do for environmental justice?” and the response she got was, “We don’t do environmental justice. There’s an office over there. Go ask them.” That’s the mindset she wanted to change. Environmental Justice Plan 2014 was our first major attempt at this. It wasn’t a traditional strategic plan; it was more of a toolkit, a way to get the agency to start integrating environmental justice into different aspects of its work. We followed that with the EJ 2020 document in 2016, which focused on actually implementing these tools. 

But just as we were getting ready to put it into action, the Trump administration came in and everything stalled. No one actively tried to dismantle the program—they just ignored it. I couldn’t even get Administrator Scott Pruitt or his team to read the EJ 2020 Action Agenda. We were left in a kind of bureaucratic limbo where we kept the program alive, but we had no support to expand it.

Then, Biden took office, and everything changed overnight. On his first day, President Biden issued an executive order on racial equity, and by the end of his first week in office, he signed another order tackling the climate crisis, with a third of it focused on environmental justice. That’s where Justice40 was mandated—requiring that at least 40 percent of certain federal investments benefit disadvantaged communities. Suddenly, we weren’t fighting to be included in conversations anymore—people were coming to us, asking how to incorporate environmental justice into the agency workings.

AZHAR: What were some of the most significant environmental justice initiatives under Biden?

TEJADA: One of the biggest successes was securing actual funding. Historically, the EPA’s EJ program had an annual budget of about $12 million, barely enough to support a handful of grants. Under Biden, that jumped to $100 million in 2022. Then the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allocated $3 billion—a historic investment in environmental justice.

That funding allowed us to launch the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TCTACs), which were designed to help grassroots organizations access federal resources. For decades, low-income communities struggled to tap into federal funding because they didn’t have the expertise to navigate grant applications. We also created the Community Change Grants, which, for the first time, provided up to $20 million directly to community organizations to tackle pollution, infrastructure and climate resilience projects.

AZHAR: How did the massive infusion of funding change EPA, which was traditionally a regulatory agency?

TEJADA: It fundamentally altered the agency’s role. Historically, EPA is a regulatory and enforcement agency, not a grant-making institution. But suddenly, we had billions to distribute, and the agency wasn’t equipped to move that money efficiently.

We lacked the infrastructure that other agencies—like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and theU.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development—have for grantmaking and oversight. 

When the $3 billion IRA investment was announced, I initially thought, how are we going to do this? That capacity didn’t exist. We had to set up grant-making infrastructure from scratch, working with intermediaries to distribute the funds. We also had to retrain staff—people who had spent their careers regulating air and water pollution were suddenly responsible for ensuring community groups could effectively use federal dollars. It was a massive institutional shift.

But the biggest impact was cultural. For years, we had been fighting to get different EPA offices to consider environmental justice in their work. Suddenly, they were coming to us and saying, “Tell us how to do this. Help us figure out where this money should go.” It was a complete reversal. The pesticide and pollution prevention programs, for instance—areas that had been notoriously closed off—were now actively seeking our input on how to allocate hundreds of millions in pollution reduction funding to the most affected communities. That had never happened before.

AZHAR: How much of the $3 billion was the agency able to disburse? Is there any remaining amount the current management is trying to claw back?

TEJADA: Of the $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act funding, about $500 million was still unallocated when the administration changed hands. That money is now stuck in limbo and, instead of using it to fund the next round of community grants, it could simply be revoked.

EPA has started issuing letters to the TCTACs and many of the Thriving Community Grantmakers, telling them that their grants are cancelled and to stop work. In some cases they are telling grantees to pay money back that has already been expended, which is legally questionable. But it looks like those two programs are now in serious jeopardy as might be EJ Collaborative Problem Solving Grants and EJ government-to-government grants that were issued in 2022 and early in 2023. So tens of thousands of communities across the United States that were relying on that financial and technical assistance to address fundamental public health threats to their communities have all been dashed.

So far, to my knowledge, this administration has not gone after the community change grants, and the funds portal for them has finally been unfrozen as of a little over a week ago. It’s great for the couple hundred organizations to hopefully still implement those grants, although they now have no technical assistance to help them implement their programs because the contract that would have supported the grantees in ensuring their projects all implemented successfully has been cancelled. 

Also, almost all of the EPA project officers overseeing those grants are on admin leave and waiting to be fired. In all, it means that over a billion dollars in awards are out there, without EPA oversight and support. It is completely contrary to the administration’s claim of preventing fraud, waste and abuse.

AZHAR: What happens to the communities that were counting on these programs?

TEJADA: Thousands—tens of thousands—of communities are impacted all across the United States: rural places, Indigenous communities, big cities, Black, brown and white communities alike.And many of these local groups have stopped everything, because they don’t know if the funding will be there tomorrow. They’re not paying their staff, they’re not implementing their projects, they’re not buying the emergency equipment or the solar panels or the construction equipment they needed. Everything’s frozen in place.

These are the communities that have historically been shut out of resources. They were finally starting to see some hope that their federal government was supporting them, and now it’s being ripped away. When you see these letters that say the awards might be terminated, people say, ‘Well, we’d better not spend a dollar, because we might have to give it back.’

AZHAR: What were the biggest challenges in implementing environmental justice programs?

TEJADA: One of the toughest challenges was getting states on board, especially in conservative states where there was resistance. Some states embraced Justice40 and used it to reshape how they distributed infrastructure funds. Others outright ignored it or actively worked against it.

There were also bureaucratic hurdles inside EPA. The agency had to make a cultural shift. You had career staff who had spent decades thinking about environmental regulations in a particular way, and now we were asking them to center environmental justice in all of their decisions. That’s not a switch you can flip overnight.

One of the greatest struggles was ensuring that communities could actually access the available funding. A lot of the organizations doing the most critical environmental justice work were small, often volunteer-driven, and didn’t have the administrative infrastructure to handle federal grants. Unlike large universities or established nonprofits, they didn’t have compliance teams or accountants who specialized in government grants. So even though money was available, the bureaucratic red tape made it incredibly difficult for many of these groups to tap into those funds.

A perfect example was a grassroots coalition in the Gulf South fighting air pollution from petrochemical plants. They had been awarded a grant to conduct independent air quality monitoring, but the reimbursement structure meant they had to front the costs—something they simply couldn’t afford. We had to work with intermediaries to find a workaround because these are exactly the groups that the funding was meant to help. Without adjustments, they were being locked out.

AZHAR: What happened to your colleagues at the EPA after the recent change of guards at the agency?

TEJADA: Most of the EPA’s environmental justice staff are placed on leave—161 of them. [Note: An EPA spokesperson said 168 people from the Office of Environmental Justice were placed on leave. Some have since been recalled.] The office was hollowed out overnight. Those who remained were overwhelmed, trying to manage the uncertainty and chaos. There’s no one left to process grants, enforce regulations or provide technical assistance. The people who spent years building these programs are now sidelined.

The new administration didn’t just cut programs; they are dismantling institutional knowledge. These were people who knew how to navigate the complexities of environmental justice enforcement, how to work with impacted communities, how to hold polluters accountable. And now, all that expertise is gone.

For those who stayed, morale has plummeted. People were afraid to speak up, afraid to push back against the rollbacks, waiting to see what would happen next.

AZHAR: What’s your personal reflection on all this?

TEJADA: I had always—especially during the last years of the Biden administration—figured we were establishing a new high watermark, to really show how good and how beneficial equity and justice could be for our entire country. I think we established a really high watermark.

But the worst outcome I feared is happening—how quickly and how far the water would recede, we’re seeing it at an astonishing pace and scale. And it’s not just receding; they’re erasing what was doneso future generations won’t even know it was possible. That, to me, is the saddest part of it all. For the first time, marginalized communities were finally starting not just to hope but to believe their government was going to work for them—and that’s being taken away from folks now.

AZHAR: What is the current focus of your work?

TEJADA: I’m now the senior vice president of environmental health at Natural Resources Defense Council, where I focus on air quality, water quality, climate adaptation, resilience and toxics. I still get to practice environmental justice, just from a different position. My work now is about making sure that even if the government steps back, the fight for justice continues.

Aman Azhar

Reporter, Washington, D.C.

Aman Azhar is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers environmental justice for Inside Climate News with focus on Baltimore-Maryland area. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and multimedia producer for the BBC World Service, VOA News and other international news organizations, reporting from London, Islamabad, the United Arab Emirates and New York. He holds a graduate degree in Anthropology of Media from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and is the recipient of the Chevening scholarship from the UK government and an academic scholarship for graduate studies from the Australian government.

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