Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating Black freedom, is also an important day to highlight the continuing fight against the many forms of racial injustice that persist around the country. One of these is environmental racism – the reality that people of color face disproportionate harm from pollution, toxic waste, extreme weather driven by climate change, and other environmental hazards. To push back against the discriminatory practices and policies of business and government that drive environmental racism, Black activists launched the modern environmental justice movement in the 1980s.

Justice40’s historic investments in environmental justice

Last Juneteenth we celebrated Justice40, the largest ever U.S. national commitment to environmental justice. Established by President Biden during his first week in office, Justice40 required that at least 40% of the benefits from federal investments in infrastructure and climate go to “disadvantaged communities” that have been historically under-resourced and overburdened by pollution. Given the impacts of environmental racism on communities of color, especially Black communities, many met this definition and stood to benefit from the initiative. As of last summer, the Biden administration had achieved $600 billion in Justice40 investments across more than 500 federal programs within 19 federal agencies.

These investments funded grants to help communities clean up contaminated land, replace diesel school buses with cleaner models, build clean energy infrastructure, and much more. These projects helped reduce the health hazards created by pollution, reduce energy costs, and create good-paying clean energy jobs in these communities.

This Juneteenth, however, this progress is threatened by a new administration that is reversing course on environmental justice.

Trump administration attacks environmental justice

On President Trump’s very first day in office, he rescinded the Justice40 initiative, effectively freezing all funding for current and planned projects and leaving communities in limbo. This executive order was only the beginning of the Trump administration’s attacks on anything they deemed to be related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Eliminating environmental justice initiatives has been a major prong of those attacks, including:

Additionally, the Trump administration has joined forces with Republicans in Congress to attack environmental justice through the budget reconciliation bill. Trump has dubbed the legislation the “Big Beautiful Bill,” while in reality it is a polluter and billionaire tax scam that will strip away protections against pollution, sell off public lands, and drive up energy costs, all to line the pockets of billionaires and Big Oil. Its environmental justice rollbacks include:

Join us in pushing back

We have a short window of opportunity to stop this bill. LCV and our partner organizations are showing up on the Hill every week to urge senators to protect our communities by rejecting this harmful bill. Join us!

• If you have 5 minutes: Call your senators (here’s how!) and tell them to vote NO on Republicans’ billionaire tax scam.
• If you are in the Washington D.C. area: Join us at our weekly events outside the Senate to make your voice heard!

With so much at stake in this moment, it’s important to come together to push back against this legislation that threatens our communities. This Juneteenth, it’s also important to recognize and celebrate how far the environmental justice movement has come. Over 40 years ago, Black activists fighting for their local communities sparked a movement and coined a new vocabulary for environmental racism that grew to gain national attention and federal action. Though the Trump administration is now trying to turn back time to an era before the federal government recognized and supported environmental justice, history cannot be erased. The movement is here to stay, and will continue to fight.