Justice for Justice40
The author is a Sophomore at Laurel School in Ohio. Laurel School is YEPT’s first-ever Chapter. To inquire about becoming a YEPT Chapter, contact our adult advisor at Jim@earthcharterindiana.org.
President Trump’s first day in office was marked by the rolling back of environmental legislation. Some label this period of the current administration as a publicity stunt, yet the primary communities targeted by the administration’s animosity don’t seem to have any stunt doubles. A study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration details in a report from 2023 that “low-income and communities of color face higher risks of illness and death from extreme heat, climate-drive floods, and air pollution compared with White people, and often lack access to adequate flood infrastructure, green spaces, safe housing and often lack protective resources.” The irreversible damage that climate change has on marginalized peoples is not something that should be treated as collateral damage. The Justice40 program aims to address the damage.
What is Justice 40?
Justice40, or Executive Order 14008, was first established by the Biden Administration on January 27, 2021, and served to address multiple injustices, both to the people and the planet. Disadvantaged communities were identified by using the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, which uses methodology related to a neighborhood or township’s reported investment in transportation, housing, occupations, water infrastructure, and health care. Justice40 ensured that at least 40% of federal climate-related investments went directly to these outlined communities. According to Justice40, the express purpose of the act was to establish “an equitable recovery for Americans facing challenges created by aging infrastructure, a frayed social safety net, natural disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.”
The five main pillars outlined in the funding framework consisted of Pollution, Climate, Funding & Capacity, Occupational Impacts, and Environmental Policy Costs & Benefits. Justice40 explains how these objectives guided policymakers to “pursue a community-anchored approach that ensures frontline communities have representation and power, both in Justice40 policy-level and local investment decision-making.”
Photo courtesy of pexels.com
How did Justice40 achieve its Goals?
Throughout the years, Justice40 saw many successful implementations across a wide variety of programs. A report by Margaret Walls in Resources for the Future explains that “Justice40 now covers 518 programs across 16 federal agencies.” When Justice40 was implemented, it put the funds directly towards the communities most susceptible to climate-invoked harm based on their socioeconomic statuses. This happens in two main ways.
First, grants-in-aid programs, which are usually pushed out to the state and local governments of the affected communities, have the most success in garnering the largest amounts of money. Walls reports that in “the Fiscal Year of 2019, grants-in-aid programs amounted to approximately $750 billion, or 16.5 percent of all federal spending.” An example of a sector covered by the grant is the Department of Transportation’s Surface Transportation Block Grant (STBG) Program, which accounts for 23% of total grant funds on the federal level. Within this sector, “the TA Set-Aside provides money for smaller-scale transportation projects such as pedestrian and bicycle facilities, recreational trails, and safe routes to school projects.” If you have noticed new additions of bike lanes and pedestrian trails in your neighborhood, STBG funding was likely involved.
The second way that Justice40 funds are distributed is through financial and technical assistance. These investments, instead of being looped through the government, go directly to individual entities, businesses, and farms. This is best represented in the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), which issues land, otherwise used for other production means, to agricultural landowners on a return payment basis that lasts 10-15 years. As explained by Walls, “the FSA has 13 programs on the covered programs list [for Justice40], including the Conservation Reserve Program, and most operate in this way, offering direct assistance to farmers through competitive application processes.” The system directly benefits low-income communities as “all these offer assistance to farmers, rural landowners, rural utilities, businesses, and other entities.”
How did Trump’s Executive Orders Impact Justice40?
Through the multitude of Executive Orders President Trump made, one of the most significant of his actions was the termination of Justice40. By the time this article was written, Trump had signed 87 executive orders, so it is important to look at how much impact just one of them holds. An article published by Hassan Ali Kanu in February 2025 detailed how, through Justice40, “over 60% of the funding obligated by the Agency through the end of 2024 did benefit disadvantaged communities.” Eliminating legislation like this, catered to re-stabilizing sacrifice zones, allows the cycle of structural oppression to keep itself in motion. You may be asking, why does the highest seat in our country want to defund marginalized communities? While the answer isn’t clear, Gail Cononello explained in a recent U.S. Policy Report on K&L Gates how “President Trump said the policies violate federal civil rights laws and ‘deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.’”
The consequences of no longer providing funding to the people suffering at the forefront of climate-related harm are detrimental and are being felt now. Marianne Lavelle from Inside Climate News explains how “organizations are going under. Farmers are losing jobs, low-income communities are losing critical access to food, and businesses are waiting on invoices that must be paid.”
A teacher working at Laurel School who applied for a grant to support her students’ environmental education explained how they “just submitted a proposal for a grant to fund education for Justice40 communities,” and they’re “disappointed to see funding frozen, leaving hundreds if not thousands of projects that help everyday Americans stalled indefinitely.”
These orders are real, the funding is real, and the frontline communities affected by Justice40’s termination are real. Why should we be putting the current administration's values over American vitality?
