Trump Guts EPA’s Environmental Justice Office, Putting Poorest Communities of Color at More Risk

The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA. He resigned in 2017 to protest a Trump administration proposal to severely scale back the size and work of the agency. “Any time that we place profit over people, then we are putting a crosshair on our most vulnerable, our most marginalized,” says Ali.