The Trump administration is cracking down on efforts within federal agencies to promote diversity, as well as to address the impacts of climate change.
According to reporting from NPR, the Trump administration has put close to 170 Environmental Protection Agency workers on leave, all who worked in the Environmental Justice office.
In another move, the EPA’s online EJScreen tool can no longer be accessed.
The tool mapped environmental indicators like air and water quality, and proximity to Superfund sites, along with socioeconomic indicators like race and income (that link was archived via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, from July of 2024). It helped the agency assess how marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and environmental hazards, and create programs to address those issues.
Ean Thomas Tafoya is the vice president of state programs for GreenLatinos, where he was formerly the Colorado State Director. The nonprofit group's mission is environmental justice and mobilizing Latino communities across the country to fight for climate action and for issues like air and water quality.
Tafoya says academics and environmental leaders had been worried that this kind of data, and other research related to climate change, might disappear under the Trump administration.
“So we've been collectively trying to capture that and protect that information so that when this time passes and we move on as Americans, that we haven't lost everything that we've built up to this point,” he said.
In addition to the 170 EPA workers, reports from Politico say that the administration wants to halve the staff of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency does a great deal of research on climate change across its programs.
Andrew Rosenberg is a marine fisheries researcher by training, who worked with NOAA for many years. He says NOAA is a research agency, but it’s also a service agency, and services will be drastically downsized if this move goes ahead.
“Like informing local communities about, what are the expected impacts of climate change so that they can prepare for those in their ongoing planning,” he said. “State and local governments everywhere, organizations, businesses everywhere… We shouldn't tell them about it because it would be better if they're… unprepared?”
Tafoya agrees, emphasizing the work federal agencies do in Colorado. The EPA has offices in Denver, and the Department of Interior and the Bureau of Land Management has a strong presence across the west. NOAA’s laboratories in Boulder are the largest concentration of the agency’s scientists in the country.
“We absolutely need to have people studying weather patterns,” Tafoya said. “We need to be getting opportunities for more notification for people when inclement weather happens. And our response and resiliency to be able to prepare for it, is all derived from that.”
Rosenberg and Tafoya say these changes impact the communities these federal researchers work in.
“Those are your neighbors,” Rosenberg said. “Those are the people who go to your schools and shop in the stores. And the facility down the road is going to close down, and so all the people that work to support that facility, they're going to be gone.”
Programs that focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, have also gotten cut since the new administration took office. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), headquartered in Boulder, closed their DEI offices last month.
Rosenberg says the people suggesting these big cuts often have no idea what the programs they’re cutting even do.
“‘Well, it's renewable energy, oh that's about climate. We know that's not happening. Cut it,’” he said, describing what he sees as the mindset of the current administration. “‘It's about diversity. We don't need any diversity. It's all going to be, you know, totally (on) merit.’ And you just start with the presumption that if you're white and you’re male, then you have merit and everybody else has to prove it, you know?”
Tafoya agrees, saying having a diverse workforce benefits agencies, especially when they’re trying to reach out to underserved communities.
“Let's take, for example, somebody who has the ability to speak another language,” he said. “Are they going to be more effective when they go into a community like Greeley and the population in East Greeley speaks Somali and Spanish and you're able to convey those abilities more effectively?”
He says these programs also attempt to rectify the legacy of racism in the U.S., a legacy that often overlaps with disproportionate environmental harm.
“The proliferation of industrial processes into certain communities is directly related to redlining, and there's a whole legacy there,” he said. “And then how about enforcement? Right? You'll hear this all the time, that we have the strongest regulations on the books, but that's not always true if you're not actually enforcing them.”
Tafoya says GreenLatinos is focusing on mobilizing their membership to respond to changes to environmental regulations in their own communities.
“When they come to roll back bedrock environmental laws, it will require them to have community input , that is built into the law,” he said. “And so whether that means testifying at a federal agency for your first time or submitting a written comment, we need those comments to be submitted because we can take them to court if they make decisions that are not in line with what the record shows.”
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