Shortly after being elected president, Joe Biden made a big promise about environmental justice: Met A 2021 executive order, he pledged that a full 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal government climate and environmental investments would reach historically disadvantaged communities. This initiative, known as Justice40, was the centerpiece of the administration’s environmental justice efforts and was intended to redress both underinvestment and environmental damage that disproportionately burdened communities of color throughout American history.
Justice40 is notable both for the simplicity and specificity of its goal and also for the large open questions on which the goal depends. For one, Justice40 was conceived before hundreds of billions of dollars in climate funding were unlocked by the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act, so it is unclear what the grand total is from which the 40 percent figure will be drawn. Second, the president did not promise 40 percent of spending, but 40 percent of the advantages of said spending, and it is not clear how the latter is derived from the former. Finally, it’s not entirely clear where exactly the money is intended to go—in other words, for the purposes of Justice40’s accounting, which communities count as “disadvantaged?”
That last question alone was the target of a years-long, open source White House project, which led to a specialized screening tool for federal agencies to use to identify disadvantaged communities. And the original executive order itself stipulated an accountability mechanism: the creation of a scorecard “detailing the environmental justice performance measures.” Three years later, however, environmental justice advocates with Grist have expressed disappointment in the quality of this progress report, saying the administration’s scorecard is confusing and provides little information about whether federal funding is on track to meet Justice40’s lofty goal.
In his current iteration, the scorecard consists of links to various web pages detailing the various environmental justice efforts undertaken by each federal agency. Most agencies reported whether or not they had dedicated environmental justice offices, the number of Justice40-related programs announced, the number of staff dedicated to environmental justice programs, and the amount of funding made available through those programs.
But the information collected offers little insight into how much of that funding has been allocated to disadvantaged communities. Because federal agencies currently do not have a uniform method for tracking funding to a specific zip code, that information was not reported. In some cases, such detection may not even be possible. For example, when the Department of Transportation builds an electric charging station along a highway, it can be used by residents of several communities spread over a large area. The corresponding improvements in air quality, to the extent that they can be determined, can also extend over a large area. Actually quantifying such benefits—whether they are improvements in air quality or health or any number of other outcomes—is even more challenging. As a result, for example, an interested member of the public can look at the EPA’s scorecard and see that the agency has 73 Justice40 programs and that it has made $14 billion in funding available. But how much of that money goes to disadvantaged communities — and the impact of those funds — is unknown.
“The scorecard as it was presented was not user-friendly,” said Maria López-Núñez, an environmental justice attorney at the New Jersey-based Ironbound Community Corporation and co-chair of a White House advisory council task force on the scorecard. “It wasn’t really to show the public what the intentions of the scorecard are. When people hear a scorecard, they think, ‘Where’s the grade?’ And of course we didn’t see any of that.”
“Given the amount of funding we’re talking about, this seems like a remarkable accountability failure,” added Justin Schott, project manager of the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan.
Schott analyze the information provided by each agency and compiled the data into a spreadsheet. He found that there were wide differences in the quality of information presented: Some agencies assigned hundreds of staff members to work on environmental justice efforts, while others reported none. Adding to the confusion, some agencies have reported numbers that appear to be incorrect. For example, the Department of Agriculture noted that it made 12,000 funding announcements in fiscal year 2022, although it only contains 65 Justice40 programs. Similarly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported holding a striking 1,914 technical assistance outreach events, although what constitutes such an event is not specified. (A spokesperson for the Housing Department confirmed the number is accurate and noted that outreach opportunities can range from Zoom calls between an agency staffer and a government official to in-person meetings with various stakeholders; a representative for the Department of Agriculture did not respond to Grist’s questions about his reporting in time for publication.)
The White House has the first version of the scorecard, which it described as a “baseline assessment of actions taken by federal agencies in 2021 and 2022,” in early 2023. Since then, it has received recommendations from the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a body made up primarily of community – and environmental justice, requested. advocates (including López-Núñez), and asked for feedback from the public. Work on the scorecard is iterative, and the agency is expected to release an updated version later this year.
“The Environmental Justice Scorecard alone cannot fully capture the depth or scope of active work or the long-term impact of the Biden-Harris administration’s environmental justice work within communities, including zero-emission school buses, cleaning up legacy pollution, and strengthening protections for clean water and air,” an administration official wrote in response to Grist’s questions. “As future versions of the Environmental Justice Scorecard are released on an annual basis, we will continually work to improve the tool based on public input and improving data, so that everyone can better track progress and identify opportunities to improve environmental justice promote.”
The Biden administration is the first presidency that environmental justice center in his policy making. His approach was broad, requires each federal agency to consider the equity implications of its actions, including the effects of its policies and the funding it distributes. Environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to praised these efforts, which they called unprecedented.
“It’s an undeniable fact that this administration has done more for environmental justice than any of the previous administrations,” said Manuel Salgado, a federal research manager at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice and a contributor to a White House advisory council report on the scorecard. “If you look at the numbers highlighted on the scorecard, they are not necessarily reflected.”
Salgado and other members of the advisory board drafted a set of recommendations to improve the scorecard last year. Salgado said a key obstacle is the lack of uniformity in how agencies manage and track the implementation of various programs. Some agencies may manage hundreds of programs and disburse billions in funding, while others may oversee only a handful. In a number of cases, funding is typically allocated to government agencies, which then make decisions about how and where to invest the funds.
“Each agency operates like their own fiefdom,” López-Núñez said. “They have their own set of entrenched customs and traditions that make it difficult to work with other agencies.”
Those wide differences in how agencies operate led the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinated work on the scorecard, to take a “common denominator approach,” according to Yukyan Lam, a research director and senior scientist at The New School’s Tishman Environment & Design Center and an independent contributor to the advisory board’s report on the scorecard. “Trying to bring all the agencies to the lowest common denominator made it more confusing and less clear to the public what the goal was,” added López-Núñez.
In an effort to identify metrics that were relevant to all federal agencies, the White House requested that agencies report environmental justice staffing levels, programs funded, and staff training conducted. While this information is useful, it “really failed to capture some of the nuances and details of the kind of work that each individual agency or department was doing,” Yam said. When Yam and other members who worked on the report met with agencies, staff were eager to come up with ways to provide specific information relevant to the programs they oversee, she said.
Accordingly, the advisory board’s report emphasized the need to supplement the standard measures by giving the agencies flexibility to report customized information most relevant to their work. “Rather than applying uniform expectations for the scorecard to all agencies, we recommend a tailored approach, allowing each agency to provide metrics relevant to its activities,” the report said.
Even with the flexibility to report different metrics, tracking the advantages of climate finance is likely to be difficult for agencies. When the EPA provides community grants that increase tree cover in a neighborhood, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development builds more energy-efficient affordable housing, or the Department of Transportation invests in electric charging stations, those investments have environmental and public health benefits. But quantifying those benefits typically involves modeling, which requires expertise and resources. Given the challenges, advocates stressed the need to at least track down funding first.
Salgado said the scorecard is not only an accountability mechanism, but also a chance for the administration to communicate its environmental justice work to the public. Most members of the public don’t have an intimate understanding of the inner workings of various federal agencies, and the scorecard could be an opportunity for the Biden administration to explain how environmental justice efforts relate to people’s everyday lives, he said. said.
“These are major environmental justice victories that need to be communicated to the general public, especially in an election year,” Salgado said. “If we want to support our elected officials who provide us with environmental justice benefits, we need to know what they’ve done right. So it’s an opportunity for them to brag and for them to highlight all these victories on environmental justice and the great things they’ve done over the course of this administration.”
