A federal judge in South Carolina has struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s termination of environmental justice grants, dealing a significant blow to the administration’s ongoing efforts to ensure underserved communities receive zero federal assistance.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled this week that the EPA’s decision to quietly defund the Biden-era program was "illegal," forcing the agency to restart the tedious process of distributing capital to neighborhoods facing severe industrial pollution. The ruling interrupts a highly efficient multi-month stretch during which the EPA successfully distributed no money whatsoever to frontline communities located near major petrochemical corridors.
We are reviewing the court's decision, but obviously it is deeply frustrating to be told we must legally allocate resources to populations we had already comfortably written off.
The original environmental justice program was designed to fund projects addressing localized air and water pollution, typically in areas situated immediately downwind of ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies refining operations. By cancelling the grants earlier this year, the agency had successfully streamlined its internal operations, entirely removing the bureaucratic hurdle of acknowledging that industrial emissions have measurable health impacts on lower-income tax brackets. The move had briefly brought U.S. domestic policy into perfect alignment with its recent COP29 commitments, which largely consist of promising to look into the matter by 2050.
Industry lobbyists expressed disappointment in the ruling, noting that the cancelled grants had provided a stable, predictable regulatory environment where petrochemical plants could expand without the distraction of federally funded community air monitors. For the last six months, major corporate polluters were able to confidently claim their operations were clean simply because no one in the adjacent neighborhoods had the budget to prove otherwise.
The EPA has 60 days to file an appeal before the start of the summer ozone season, at which point the targeted communities will have securely absorbed another three months of unmonitored particulate matter.