While President Biden’s lone term in office will run through Jan. 19, the resignation of Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael S. Regan marks the end of a too-short and ultimately failed experiment in seeking environmental justice through regulation.
As the first Black man to head the EPA, Regan put the agency’s focus on Americans who have for generations experienced wildly disproportionate exposures to toxic chemicals and the most dramatic effects of climate change. Regan acknowledged this in the resignation letter, noting that the agency took environmental justice and “placed it at the center of our decision-making.”
That is both true and historic, but the more systemic change that Regan’s EPA tried to bring about was stonewalled by legal challenges that threatened to undermine the agency’s strongest tool for righting environmental injustices.
That tool is Title XI of the Civil Rights Act, which says, “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
That means that no state or local agency receiving federal funds can engage in discrimination. Specifically, the federal government can withhold funds over discrimination even if that discrimination is unintentional or cannot be proved.
Before the Regan era, the EPA was notorious for taking ages with Title XI investigations and rarely withheld federal funds. The EPA has only twice said that local agencies were being discriminatory.
That was all supposed to change under Regan, who the Biden administration empowered to use the full force of Title XI to investigate environmental injustice in a way never before done. The agency started with what is arguably the most dramatic case of environmental injustice anywhere in the country, the River Parishes in Louisiana, where high concentrations of chemical plants and refineries have made it so the nearby Black communities have a 95% greater chance of developing cancer than the average American.
There was real potential for change: a draft agreement that the EPA and state regulators reached as a result of the investigation into the area known as Cancer Alley, which included a provision requiring regulators to consider how emissions affect people of different socio-economic backgrounds living nearby before approving new pollution permits.
That agreement was never finalized — the investigation was dropped after then-Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (who is now governor) sued the EPA early in 2023 over the disparate impact standard.
The suit argues that the federal government should be able to withhold funds only if it can prove that there was an intent to discriminate; in August, a district court judge nominated by President Donald Trump sided with Louisiana in the case. Earlier in 2024, 23 Republican state attorneys general wrote a letter to the EPA calling for the end of Title XI investigations, which they referred to as “racial engineering.”
The legal challenge to Title XI and the risk that the Louisiana case could potentially go before a decidedly unfriendly Supreme Court all but ended investigations into discrimination by Regan’s EPA. Reporting by The Intercept showed that Title XI cases were widely dropped in states run by Republicans.
With Trump heading back to the White House, the EPA is one of the agencies on the chopping block. Former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Long Island Republican, is Trump’s pick to lead the EPA. If confirmed, Zeldin will, in Trump’s words, be empowered to “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses.”
Willy Blackmore is a freelance writer and editor covering food, culture, and the environment. He lives in Brooklyn.