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The end of the EPA’s fight to protect overpolluted communities

The first thing that Amanda Chronin did when she was offered to be a job supervisor at the Environmental Protection Agency, who was buying herself a large piece of chocolate cake. The 25 -year -old New York citizens spent nine months searching for work in the environmental invitation without a little luck, until it stumbled upon its publication of the analyst of a program at the Environmental Justice Office of the Environmental Protection Agency, or external civil rights, based in Washington, DC when it joined in May 2023.

“I felt I was part of a big and special thing,” Chronin recalls.

Soon it fell into the world of environmental justice, which helped coordinate the partnerships of the Environmental Protection Agency with tribes and local advocacy groups and organize seminars on the Internet to inform the residents from Arizona to Alabama’s state about federal scholarships that they can apply to obtain to fight pollution in their back markets. Last November, when Donald Trump won the presidential elections on a platform and promised to organize the environment in the country’s industrial corridors, Chronin knew her days in the agency could be numbered.

Certainly, on February 6, with 167 other workers in the office I put In unlimited vacation, closed from their federal email accounts. After a week, 388 additional employees are still in the first year of their position at the agency Completed.

During its vacation, Cronin was then filled with diving and yoga seasons and “trying to maintain a healthy balance in staying in view with the failure to fall into the DOOM SCROLL spiral.”

Last Tuesday, Cronin got more bad news: The Environmental Protection Agency will start eliminating all environmental justice offices and positions immediately, including jobs in OEJEC and in environmental justice offices within the ten regional departments of the Environmental Protection Agency. In an internal note, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency Lee Zeldin said this step aims to move the agency to agree with President Trump January 20, executive order Entitled “Ending DEI Root and Successful Government Programs and preferably.”

While diversity, fairness, integration, or Dei, it has been traditionally understood as guidelines for employment and acceptance within companies and universities, the Trump administration has repeatedly created such initiatives with the efforts made to environmental justice, which the agency has made since 2020, since 2020 Known As a fair and meaningful participation of all people, regardless of race or social and economic status, in developing and implementing environmental laws and policies in the country.

“It is ridiculous because our work is actually in line with the priorities of the declared management, which raises the poor working class communities,” Cronen told Grist.

Unlike Trump’s politicized messages that linked the concept of environmental justice with Biden and Democrats, the OEJCR Environmental Protection Agency established in 1992 during the administration of President George H -Bush to combat “high and unpaved human health or environmental effects on minorities and low -income populations.” Until recently, the office had only dozens of employees and sat inside the agency’s policy office. In 2022, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency Michael Reagan Declare OEJCR will be converted into an equal programs for the Air and Radiation Office or the Water Office, and that the size of its employees will grow to 200 employees. Margot Brown, the first vice president of environmental justice and fairness in the Environmental Defense Fund, said the decision was “transformed.”

“The need to make sure that every American has clean air, clean water, and a safe land to live in,” she explained. “He made it a national priority.” The Environmental Protection Agency official continued weekly with the heads of all the agency’s national programs, which means that OEJCR now has direct and routine access to the best decision -makers of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Another former ecosystem, which Trici will call, joined the Environmental Protection Agency during the OEJCR recruitment process, and was expelled after Trump took office. (She asked to withhold her real name for fear of influencing the prospects for future employment in the agency.) Her job was to help manage cooperative agreements, a term for a special type of grant issued with great government participation.

“It was a dream job,” she told Grist in a phone call. “I allowed me to gain more experience in my experience, wider arrival.”

Trissy described an active work environment with people from a variety of backgrounds and skills groups who uprooted their jobs and lives in other parts of the country to be part of the Biden administration pushing environmental justice. A team of grant makers that were working with historically deprived societies to implement environmental justice programs.

“We told them that we will do things differently this time, and that we will make the mistakes of the past,” Trisi said about the two hundred office. “We worked hard to build their confidence.”

Trump’s allegations of President Trump and Zealin mocked their office that their office had been wasted federal dollars on Dei’s initiatives. She said, “We only give money and say we are back and see within 6 months.” “We meet them on every step on the road.”

The imminent closure news of the environmental justice offices at the Environmental Protection Agency came just one day before Zealin’s announcement of “The largest editorial work in the history of the United States”, “ It aims to supervise the Federal Automobile, Industry and Gas Industries. The Environmental Protection Agency intends to eliminate dozens of environmental regulations, including the rules that govern the oil refineries and emissions aimed at climate. Also last week, Zilden I finish 20 billion dollars in giving climate Biden, many of which have been assigned to disadvantaged societies. In all, the actions of Tramil Biden last week are making efforts to fight excessive arrest in the country’s industrial corridors and put millions of people due to the risk of increasing exposure to air and toxic water.

Last Thursday, one of the federal judges, one in Maryland and another in California, Find The Trump administration extinguishing is illegal and ordered to return thousands of federal employees. On Sunday, Tiri received an e -mail from the Environmental Protection Agency that she had been completed that it had been canceled; She is now on administrative leave until further notice. She said that the news provided some relief, but not much. She believes that her position will be on the cutting block after that.

“You know these brown fields?” True’s request, referring to toxic sites where previous industrial factories operate once. “Oil companies get to solve and go elsewhere. But what about societies next to those places? What will happen to them?”


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