From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with David Cash, the former EPA administrator for Region 1-New England. 

Former president Joe Biden made environmental justice a core initiative of his administration and especially his Environmental Protection Agency. But as President Trump seeks to undo Biden’s legacy, his EPA is halting funding for EJ programs and shuttering its office of Environmental Justice.

David Cash led EPA’s Region 1 covering New England until Jan. 20, as it is customary for regional administrators to resign when a new president is sworn in. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

JENNI DOERING: Let’s start with the cuts to environmental justice programs responsible for serving marginalized, disadvantaged communities. Can you give us an overview of the key EJ programs at EPA and what impact they had?

DAVID CASH: There are a number of them and all of them are being targeted by this new EPA. The whole foundational focus of the EJ program is to address long-standing burdens that poor and minority communities have suffered under because of where things like highways and manufacturing facilities and power plants are sited and because of the public health implications of that. 

For example, minorities in low-income communities have higher rates of things like asthma and heart disease and cancer because they’re closer to these sources of pollution. The whole focus of environmental justice programs, which go back decades, by the way, and have transcended Democratic and Republican administrations, is to figure out how to alleviate these burdens and turn these wrongs of environmental injustices into environmental justice. 

What these environmental justice investments did was provide funding for electric school buses in these communities, provide funding to remove lead pipes in these communities. Blood lead levels for kids who live in these communities is higher than in other communities. Why shouldn’t we want to invest in these communities if they’re so concerned with efficiency and impact and effectiveness? That’s precisely where we should be investing our resources. Essentially, what EPA is doing is eviscerating these programs by reducing staff, freezing funding and all of those kinds of things that are going to hurt these communities.

DOERING: What do you make of the administration’s denial of environmental justice itself? EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called it “so-called environmental justice.”

CASH: It’s part and parcel with how they’re approaching all of this, which is not using science and not using evidence, and being driven by ideology or by the desire to put the interests of polluters, fossil fuel companies and toxic chemical producers ahead of protecting our children, ahead of protecting our air, ahead of protecting our water. 

So of course, to justify that, they’re going to have to say it’s unfair, or whatever excuse they’re giving, when in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The investments that we’re making by focusing on environmental justice bring the greatest impact that we possibly can. 

DOERING: This administration seems to be taking a sort of “race-blind” approach to what they’re doing across the government. They’re getting rid of DEI, they’re lumping in environmental justice as part of that. What exactly does environmental justice mean when it comes to race as well as other aspects of a community?

CASH: Race is highly correlated with the kind of problems that I talked about—the overburdening of different kinds of pollution in particular areas. It’s correlated with it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean communities that are Black or brown. 

For example, Springfield, Massachusetts, is an old industrial city, and is a low-income community with a median income that’s about half the state average. It’s also a majority-minority community. 

It has one of the highest asthma rates in the country, and so they applied a very robust, rigorous application process to get between $19 million and $20 million of an environmental justice grant to completely renovate many municipal buildings so that they would be more energy efficient, to invest in electric vehicles within the municipal fleet, to help people who live in apartments get energy retrofits so that they could clean up their apartments so they wouldn’t have oil furnaces and that kind of stuff that pollute the air. Some of this money was going to go to clean up houses that continually have mold problems, which we know cause asthma, or have lead pipes. This was going to save the city money so they could focus, let’s say, on education instead of energy costs, and it was going to save money for these customers. So Springfield had an opportunity to clean up its air, clean up its water, hire local people to do these jobs—and the EPA is putting the kibosh on that. 

DOERING: Let’s talk more about replacing lead pipes and clean drinking water. Many of these communities relied heavily on EPA programs to provide them with assistance for replacing lead pipes. How is that going to be impacted by this EPA effort to erase environmental justice programs?

CASH: It’s going to make it harder for these cities and towns to clean up their water. It will mean more and more people exposed to lead, and kids exposed to lead, and therefore kids having education problems and attention deficit problems, all of those kinds of things that are related to high blood lead levels. 

At this point, it’s completely unlawful what EPA is doing. These are congressionally mandated investments to go to communities that have been overburdened and are vulnerable. Essentially what EPA is doing by blocking and freezing the funding is flouting what Congress has told them to do. We’re going to see more public health impacts because of the EPA pulling back on these programs.

DOERING: Administrator Zeldin says that he’s giving some of the responsibility of environmental protection back to the states. What’s your reaction to that approach?

CASH: The Environmental Protection Agency in this country has always been partnered with state environmental protection agencies, and I used to be a Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection commissioner, so I worked for the state, and I worked hand in hand with EPA. I didn’t always agree with EPA, but I saw EPA as a co-regulator, and that’s the relationship it always has, and always should have. 

With changes in administrations, there is a different focus on states. There are different focuses on what roles each should play, but a full abandonment of the role of the federal EPA will leave states in the lurch. The states depend on EPA for funding. They depend on EPA for scientific advancement, scientific monitoring of pollution, on scientific analysis. 

It was announced that EPA is going to get rid of the Office of Research and Development. That’s essentially the scientists who do all of the work that states depend on, that EPA depends on, other federal agencies depend on, something on the order of 1,500 scientists, biologists, chemists, hydrologists, the kind of people who understand why pipes might be filled with water that has lead in it, why an industrial polluting site might be toxic for your children, why the particular kinds of cars that drive by might cause asthma. These are the scientists that drive what we do. 

EPA, by statute, is a scientific organization, and by eviscerating the science program, what are you doing? You’re eviscerating the ability to regulate, to hold accountable the polluters, to provide the benefits to communities all over the country who want to have clean air and clean water.

DOERING: EPA is a science-based agency, is what I hear you saying. And in early February, the Trump administration removed from the EPA website the EJ screen and mapping tool that was provided for the public, which kind of brought the science and understanding of environmental issues directly to the public. What was this online resource used for? And what do you think its removal means for communities? 

CASH: This was a database and mapping tool that allowed you— the user, the public, the city planner, the air quality director in a state—to this map and ask questions: Where are there high asthma rates? Where are there toxic waste sites? Where do we see water quality problems in ponds? 

You can ask lots of different questions and ask this map to map it with these correlates of things like income, race and public health impacts, so that if you’re a municipality, if you’re a state, if you’re the EPA, you could say, ‘Hm, maybe we should focus our electric vehicle program on these cities because they have high asthma rates.’ Or, ‘Oh, maybe we should be focusing our clean water programs on these areas, because these are where people recreate in waters.’ Things like that. So it’s an incredible tool. There’s no ideology behind this tool. This is a tool backed by decades of data collection, monitoring data in which we partner with states and cities to get the right data. It’s all checked and double checked and triple checked, and it’s a tool. It’s a tool of information. It’s a tool of science. So you could see why it would be taken down, because what this tool points to are areas where we should be investing and protecting people’s health and put a path forward on how to hold accountable these polluters. 

DOERING: The Office of Environmental Justice at EPA was actually established by President George H.W. Bush over three decades ago. What has been its history of addressing environmental justice issues, particularly environmental racism in this country?

CASH: It’s a checkered history, of course, and there have been times where there’s been more focus on it and times when there’s been less focus on it. 

But throughout, it’s been driven by the scientific research that shows, for example, that communities in the areas where there are more fossil fuel plants, more manufacturing facilities, transportation corridors, have higher rates of asthma and heart disease and lung disease and cancer. 

It’s been on and off, but in the last four years, the focus on it has brought huge benefits to communities all over this country: red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas, agricultural areas. All of those have benefited by having cleaner water and cleaner air and seeing increase in job growth, because all of these programs are about growing jobs in these communities as well, whether those are the jobs of replacing lead pipes or the new battery manufacturing facility that’s in Kentucky or West Virginia, or the new bus manufacturing facility. I mean, those are jobs. Those are jobs precisely in the communities that need it most. So those are at risk as well.

DOERING: How do these recent decisions impact people’s trust of the EPA? Which, as you mentioned, has a checkered history when it comes to addressing climate justice.

CASH: When I visited communities all over New England at the beginning of my time working at EPA Region 1, there was a lot of mistrust. We said, ‘Oh, there’s funding that’s going to be coming to help your community.’ The Inflation Reduction Act was just passed, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was just passed, and there was a lot of skepticism. And we kept on saying this, new staff is going to be able to help you out. We’re going to have technical assistance for you. We’re going to help you figure out how to craft an application for a grant that can best support you. 

We built trust over time, and it wasn’t perfect. They still have skepticism, and they should, but now, now this is like skepticism on an order of magnitude, so much higher, because they’re seeing basic tenets of our democratic system being questioned, when our legal system is being flouted, when law firms are being targeted, when science is being undermined. These are all basic tenets of democracy.