Trump Eviscerates a Bedrock Public Health and Environmental Protection Law
Last week, the Trump administration gutted one of the nation’s bedrock public health, environmental, and climate protection laws — the National Environmental Policy Act.
NEPA has long been a target of polluting industries, particularly the fossil fuel industry. It requires federal agencies considering approval of expansions or new operations to first evaluate and publicly disclose environmental and related social and economic harms and allows for a unique level of public participation and input into major federal actions. Dismantling the law could have devastating consequences for local communities across the nation.
The Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, is one such community. It is already inundated and overburdened by polluting operations and faces the threat of even more to come, with proposals for a massive new highway expansion and its fourth fossil-fueled power plant. NEPA is a fundamental tool used by residents to protect public health and safety. But it is not the only one. I visited Ironbound in mid-February, when I met Ana Baptista, who asserts that Ironbound is ready for any fight.
She helped lead local efforts to pass the New Jersey Environmental Justice Law in 2020, the first and foremost state law of its kind, which adopts and expands upon some of NEPA’s most critical requirements and is a model other states and the nation can now follow.
Her family immigrated to the U.S. from Portugal in the 1970s when Baptista was six-years-old, part of a wave of people who came to Ironbound fleeing a right-wing dictator and the economic collapse that followed in his wake. In this working-class largely community of color, her mother found work as a hospital cleaner, and her father at a fish market.
As a child, Baptista often served as their English translator, including when neighbors encouraged the family to attend local organizing meetings to halt the expansion of polluting industrial operations where they live. She recalls sitting in those rooms and thinking to herself, “We’re badass. We have power!”
By the time she was in high school, Baptista was a community advocate in her own right. Today, she is an associate professor of environmental policy and sustainability management and director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School in New York.
Baptista is trying to show me a local community garden a few blocks from her parent’s house. It’s the site of a proposed new solar-powered microgrid and an example of efforts to expand renewable green energy here with federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that has been appropriated by Congress but is now threatened by the Trump administration. Unfortunately, we’re stuck behind a massive eighteen wheeler truck blocking the small neighborhood street. A few blocks later, we hit another street clogged this time with a fossil fuel tanker truck. Baptista laughs when I ask if the trucks belong here, before answering an unequivocal, “no.” These are residential streets filled with children, schools, and homes, that are supposed to be off-limits to the thousands of heavy duty freight trucks that travel daily to and from the nearby Ports of Newark and Elizabeth and regularly inundate the community with both traffic and toxic diesel smoke.
“It adds up to a lot of really significant public health impacts and pollution impact in the neighborhood,” Baptista tells me.
As we tour Ironbound and the surrounding area, we pass under crisscrossing freeways and train tracks laden with freight cars. We are forced to pause our conversations to wait for passenger jets flying in and out of Newark Airport, roaring overhead by the minute, to pass. In the area known as the “Chemical Corridor,” we are struck by the putrid stench from the open air sewage treatment plant — the largest in the state — followed by that of the fat rendering facility that burns animal carcasses. We go by the state’s largest garbage incinerator, multiple fossil-fueled power plants, rows upon rows of giant oil storage tanks each the size of a large building that line the port, and an oil refinery, among other polluting operations harming public health and the climate.
Just as we catch sight of the New York City skyline in the distance, another tanker truck drives by this time carrying human sewage. Baptista reminds me that almost none of the commercial and industrial operations taking place here service her community.
The Trump administration is on course to make conditions here a great deal more difficult, including with its effort to decimate NEPA.
Trump Takes a Hatchet to the National Environmental Policy Act
NEPA was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in 1969 and signed by President Richard Nixon into law in 1970. The law requires the federal government to assess the impacts of proposed major actions on “the human environment” by requiring agencies to “look before they leap” and consider how permits and other actions — on everything from oil pipelines, export terminals, and power plants to bridges, tunnels, and wind farms — will impact the public and the environment; consider measures to mitigate or avoid potential harm (including not doing the project); and engage the public, including allowing citizens to bring legal action against the federal government if they believe it has failed to comply with these rules.
It is largely unique among federal law in that it explicitly requires agencies to consider the “cumulative impacts” of existing pollution sources and other harms on people and the environment, rather than consider projects or pollutants one-by-one. This is a particularly vital consideration for places already overburdened with pollution and industrial operations and when taking account of the added impact of additional emission on the worsening climate crisis.
“NEPA is hugely important,” Wendy Park, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is currently arguing a NEPA case before the U.S. Supreme Court, tells me.
“NEPA is there for a purpose,” says John Reichman, a well-known New York attorney. Reichman represents more than 60 public health, labor, transportation, and environmental organizations in New York and New Jersey in a NEPA case involving Ironbound. “When you have a project which has substantial environmental impacts, you need to review what those impacts are and provide for mitigation measures. And if you don’t do that, then you’re basically undercutting a bedrock environmental law that the country has had since the Nixon Administration.”
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump reportedly privately promised to do the fossil fuel industry’s bidding in exchange for big political donations — suggesting he would upend historic progress made on the green energy transition, climate, and the environment under President Joe Biden.
In his short time as president, Trump has kept his word and then some, implementing a radical deregulatory agenda that goes well-beyond his first term in office and is part of a broader effort to dismantle our fundamental democratic institutions and the rule of law. Trump is eliminating environmental and climate protections and has provided for the unfettered and virtually unlimited expansion of fossil fuels, freed as much as possible from public oversight or enforcement. There’s little reason to believe this will benefit U.S. consumers, including because the president has significantly increased the industry’s ability to export its products overseas, which could lead to higher domestic prices for gasoline and home heating fuel. Dismantling NEPA is a fundamental component of this fossil fuel industry wish list, part of an effort it euphemistically refers to as “permitting reform” to not only greenlight all of its own projects, but also eliminate the competition. Eager to oblige, Trump has (temporarily, for now) suspended permits for all renewable energy projects, including wind and solar, on federal lands and waters.
On his first day in office, Trump signed the Unleashing American Energy Executive Order. Under the heading, “Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting,” the order directs the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to propose rescinding all of its NEPA regulations. On February 19, the CEQ acted on the order, taking the unprecedented step of eliminating all of its rules that implement NEPA, thereby taking the legs out from under the law.
“It’s the shoot first, ask questions later form of rulemaking,” Kristen Boyles, a managing attorney at Earthjustice in Seattle, Washington, tells me. Earthjustice regularly represents community groups engaging in the NEPA process, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. CEQ short-circuited standard rule-making, she explains, by announcing the change and asking the public to submit comments “on the decision they’ve already made and finalized, which is as silly as it sounds,” Boyles says, stressing: “there’s no reason you have to immediately repeal regulations that have been in place for 50 years.”
Trump has not repealed the law, which would require an act of Congress. But a law is fairly meaningless if it cannot be clearly implemented and enforced, the task that CEQ was established to perform. Earthjustice declared, “CEQ Eviscerates NEPA” in a press release responding to the action. Hundreds of individual federal agencies that are facing severe staffing and funding cuts are now tasked with implementing the law, many of which are led by proponents and authors of Project 2025, the notoriously right-wing extremist policy playbook, which describes NEPA as “a monstrosity.”
The agencies have a wide variety of approaches to NEPA. Some have extensive policies while others have none, or simply refer to CEQ’s rules, which no longer exist. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has one of the most robust NEPA policies, but Rolling Stone has learned that staffing cuts from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency may have resulted in all EPA staff who conduct NEPA reviews in at least two regions of the country being terminated or placed on administrative leave — impacting Arkansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and 74 Tribal Nations, according to a letter from members of Congress to the EPA and an anonymous source within EPA close to the matter.
CEQ released a memorandum providing guidance to the agencies on how to proceed in its regulatory absence that included a list of several core NEPA provisions it would prefer they largely ignore, Boyle explains. These include consideration of cumulative impacts, environmental justice, and the climate. The memo further threatens to severely constrain both public and government involvement by instructing the agencies to prioritize documents prepared by the “project sponsor” — typically a company seeking to build or expand projects, such as oil refineries or pipelines.
Democratic members of Congress have raised alarm and environmental groups and attorneys general are sure to sue. But in the interim, the likely result is stagnation — a lack of implementation, oversight, and enforcement that will be measured in lives lost while chaos and confusion reigns, “which is likely the point,” Boyles adds, followed by a deep long sigh.
Diesel is Deadly
Ironbound’s main street bustles with young families walking by storefronts displaying flags and posters from Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, and other nations representing the multitude of cultures and ethnicities sharing the neighborhood. The tight-knit Portuguese community is easy to find at restaurants serving Portuguese food to a clientele speaking almost entirely in Portuguese, where TVs are tuned to Portuguese stations, and where people clearly know and care for their neighbors.
“There is a lot of love of community here,” Baptista tells me, pride filling her voice. “The communities here have a very strong fabric.”
The red brick elementary school Baptista attended as a child is just about half a block from her parents’ home and has an outdoor playground that sits at the intersection of several streets. She explains at least 200 to 300 trucks pass by the school every hour, based on counts she conducted when she worked as the environmental justice organizer at the non-profit Ironbound Community Corporation on whose Board of Trustees she still serves. In the nearby predominantly Black Southward neighborhood, the Southward Environmental Alliance counts some 500 trucks per hour passing through their small community.
“The biggest source of localized air pollution is definitely from the diesel trucks because of the intensity of trucking here,” Baptista says, adding, “the community has been organizing for decades to try to clean up trucking and the seaport in general.”
“Diesel is deadly,” she stresses. “Diesel is one of the worst air pollutants for public health, especially children.” Diesel fumes from trucks are a significant contributor to childhood asthma suffered by one in four children in Newark, almost three times the national average. It strikes unequally, with an asthma mortality rate among Black and Hispanic children in New Jersey five times greater than that for white children in the state.
Community groups are using NEPA in their fight against a proposed bridge expansion project that would significantly increase truck traffic in Ironbound, Southward, and other already hard-hit areas of the city. A proposal to tear down, replace and expand the Newark Bay Hudson County Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike would bring as much as 38.5 percent more trucks while failing to reduce traffic congestion, New York attorney John Reichman tells me. Reichman represents dozens of local groups who argue that the project has proceeded without a proper environmental review as required by NEPA, including failing to account for the success of New York’s congestion pricing system.
In its first week, congestion pricing resulted in a 65 percent reduction in rush hour traffic from the Holland Tunnel, which significantly lessens the need for the bridge extension, Richman argues. It’s also extremely popular, with six out of ten New Yorkers in a recent poll saying they want the measure to continue. The environmental review also failed to adequately account for a more viable alternative as required by NEPA: investing the more than $10 billion slated for the project to expand public transit.
Reichman is adamant that the Trump administration cannot simply eliminate federal NEPA regulations or New York’s congestion pricing by fiat, as Trump has proposed (regardless of whether Trump declares himself “King”). “Too often people are just cowering at these actions and not just saying they’re bullshit,” which they are, he tells me.
When New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched a lawsuit challenging Trump’s effort to block congestion pricing, it also turned to NEPA, citing the administration’s failure to uphold its obligation required by the law to “evaluate the potential environmental effects” of its action, including on “populations and communities that have pre-existing pollution and health burdens due to historic transportation and land use decisions.”
“If anything, NEPA should be stronger,” says Nicky Sheats, Director of the Center for the Urban Environment Kean University and a Senior Policy Fellow at Princeton’s Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment. “It’s basically the main thing that guarantees some community input into activities and projects that are going to affect the community for years,” Sheats explains. With Baptista, Sheats is a founder and Board of Trustees member of Newark-based New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance and a long-time advocate for Ironbound. Together with Ironbound Community Corporation and Southward Environmental Alliance, the three groups submitted a letter as part of the NEPA comment process opposing the Turnpike expansion.
NEPA is also a potential tool in the community’s effort to halt what would be the fourth fossil-fuel power plant in the Ironbound–a four square-mile neighborhood of just 50,000 people.
The third plant was built after “a bitter community struggle” waged and lost against former Governor Chris Christie, Baptista explains. “It was brought online at a time when we were supposed to be talking about renewable energy and clean power. And instead of going in the direction of solar and wind, they were building another natural gas plant that was going to be around for the next 30 years, and keeping us dependent on fossil fuels, but also contributing massively to localized air pollution,” in addition to the worsening climate crisis, Baptista says.
Last week, the state OK’d Ironbound’s fourth fossil-fuel power plant. The final approval now rests with the EPA. The plant is meant to provide backup power to the sewage treatment facility, which lost electricity during Superstorm Sandy. The community opposes the power plant, and has come up with a greener alternative.
“We could see where the trend was going,” Maria Lopez Nunez, a longtime resident of Ironbound and the former Deputy Director of Advocacy and Organizing at Ironbound Community Corporation, tells me. “Everybody builds their own fossil-fuel powered power plant to fight climate change while creating more climate change?!” she asks, incredulous at the idea. Instead, she devised a plan to provide easily deployable solar energy throughout the Ironbound neighborhood at times of need. She even helped secure federal funding for the project through the Inflation Reduction Act.
An analysis conducted by Earthjustice and the Ironbound Community Corporation finds that solar power and battery storage could not only more readily provide power to the sewage facility, but would also save 70 percent of the projected costs. Even better than building a fossil-fuel power plant in a flood zone, they argue, is to keep these renewable energy backup systems offsite on safer ground, ready to deploy at times of need.
The original NEPA review for the project (funded by the Federal Emergency Management Administration) was conducted over a decade ago, and a great deal has changed in the intervening years, including the dramatically reduced price and increased feasibility of renewable energy. Because NEPA requires agencies “to revisit its alternatives analysis whenever there are changed circumstances that affect the factors relevant to the development and evaluation of alternatives,” community groups could now assert that a new review is needed.
While the struggle to halt the power plant continues, Baptista is always mindful to remember that they also score wins. “People come here, and they see the facilities and the industry. What they don’t see are the victories. The dozens of facilities which this community stopped because we organized,” Baptista says. Victories have also come from decades of advocating for policies adopted at the federal level, most concretely by the Biden administration.
They cite numerous successes. For the first time in 20 years, the Biden administration strengthened pollution standards for heavy trucks. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provide billions of dollars directly to the state of New Jersey and to community groups, including Ironbound Community Corporation and New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. New Jersey received a $2.2 million grant from the Clean Trucks Plan and a $400 million grant from the Clean Ports Program, among many other grants for air monitoring, community solar projects, green job development, public transportation, and more.
This money is not only threatened by Trump’s federal funding freeze, but also the administration’s efforts to actively claw back congressionally appropriated funds. New Jersey’s grants are particularly at risk because many were distributed as part of Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, some $400 billion in federal funding to overburdened communities nationally that was rescinded by a Trump executive order.
New Jersey Attorney General Takes on Trump
“The president can disagree with Joe Biden’s policies,” New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin tells me. “What he cannot do is disregard laws because he doesn’t like them. That’s not what the rule of law allows.”
“Payments made through the IRA were congressionally authorized and signed by a president of the United States,” Platkin says. “These programs will lower your utility bills, they’ll help make sure we have cleaner energy so that your kids are not breathing polluted air, and here is the president withholding hundreds of millions of dollars across the country.”
Platkin has worked with a coalition of Democratic attorneys general to hold the Trump administration to account for many of its most blatantly illegal actions, including denying birthright citizenship and unleashing DOGE. They successfully sued to unlock nearly $3 trillion in federal assistance funding allocated to the states frozen by the administration. When Trump failed to comply, Platkin and the coalition then went back to court last week to get a preliminary injunction motion to force the administration adhere to the law.
“There are ways for us to address his non-compliance,” Platkin says of Trump. “This is where I think people in the administration need to understand, it’s one thing to say you’re loyal to the president. I want to see what happens when you’re hauled into court as a person within the EPA or whatever agency is non-compliant, and you’re the one who’s personally not spending the funding that Congress has passed a law saying you have to.”
He’s ready to take on polluters in absence of federal action. Platkin has sued ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and the fossil fuel industry’s leading industry lobby, the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that their deceptive actions encouraged the unchecked burning of fossil fuels and worsening of climate change. A state Superior Court dismissed the case earlier this month, but “we immediately appealed,” Platkin tells me, and “will continue to press this case forward.”
Platkin is also standing behind NEPA, which he calls “an important tool to protect our residents.” While it can surely be improved, he argues, “if the administration is going to change regulations, they have to follow proper process.” If they don’t, he warns, they can expect legal challenges.
New Jersey’s Landmark Environmental Justice Law
One of the most significant threats presented by Trump’s evisceration of NEPA is the elimination of the consideration of cumulative impacts. New Jersey’s recently implemented landmark Environmental Justice Law may provide a crucial remedy, and it is already being used as a guide for other states and the federal government to follow.
“The single most important requirement of NEPA law is the consideration of cumulative impacts,” Patrick Parenteau, Professor of Law Emeritus and Senior Fellow for Climate Policy at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, tells me.
NEPA is almost unique in federal law in its requirement that proposed projects not be considered in isolation, but rather in how they contribute to the pollution, climate emissions, and other stressors already present in a community or environment. It is a particularly potent and critical tool in areas like Ironbound that are already overburdened and inundated with pollution and industrial operations. These conditions impact many different people across the U.S. but are disproportionately found in communities of color and low-income communities, making the consideration of cumulative impacts fundamental to achieving environmental justice.
In 2020, the state enacted the New Jersey Environmental Justice Law after more than a decade of organizing led by Baptista, Sheats, and Lopez Nunez together with other community advocates and elected officials. The law declares that “all New Jersey residents, regardless of income, race, ethnicity, color, or national origin, have a right to live, work, and recreate in a clean and healthy environment.” It addresses “the disproportionate environmental and public health impacts of pollution on overburdened communities.” By definition, many such communities are majority white and low-income, others are majority or disproportionately people of color. It is the first and the most comprehensive law of its kind in the nation.
Core to the law is the requirement that a cumulative impacts analysis be performed before the state can grant a wide variety of permits. The law then goes even further than NEPA by requiring that the state not only consider, but in certain circumstances deny permits if the analysis determines that a new project poses an unacceptable health and environmental risk when considered in conjunction with the threats those communities already face. In April, New Jersey completed the rules implementing the bill’s requirements, bringing the law fully into force.
State Senator Troy Singleton, who sponsored the bill and helped shepherd it to passage, tells me that he’s been meeting with state legislators across the country eager to implement their own versions of the law. “Our state has set a national precedent. I was proud to offer that law,” he says.
U.S. Senator Cory Booker, the former mayor of Newark, is one of the law’s early champions. In 2021, he introduced the federal Environmental Justice Act, which among requirements, would enshrine cumulative impact consideration not only within NEPA, but also the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act.
“Ultimately, we will need a federal environmental justice law,” Baptista says. “I hope that in my lifetime, I’ll see it.”
Alimenta el Jardin!
Baptista and I finally reach the community garden, parking down the block and proceeding by foot. It’s buried beneath a layer of fresh snow, but colorful hand painted murals brighten the otherwise oppressively grey day. A bright yellow and red sign declares “Climate Justice for All.” with Black and brown hands reaching out to one another and for a bright yellow sunflower across a blue and green globe. Another in turquoise and florescent yellow, with thick purplish pink letters reminiscent of an eggplant reads, “Alimenta el Jardin (no el incinerador) deje su abono aqui!” (Feed the Garden (not the incinerator) leave your compost here!”)
Rows of elevated wood planters holding soil sit ready beneath the snow. A video from the garden in summer months is filled with local teenagers smiling, handling the fresh soil, watering vegetables, and laughing in the sun. They’re learning how to grow the food they’ll later eat and share with friends and family, and how to become community organizers like Baptista.
Beside the community garden is an empty asphalt parking lot. It is the planned site of the mobile microgrid powered by solar panels to service the neighborhood during emergencies. It’s part of a larger project funded with a $20 million IRA Community Change Grant — money the Trump administration has vowed to take back.
Baptista is deeply worried but not deterred. She sees people joining in solidarity from across the state and nation to support and defend what they love against Trump’s assaults. She also sees perseverance in Ironbound.
“There’s a lot of love of community, a lot of value, assets, culture, and history here that people have built with their blood, sweat, and tears, and they’re not giving it up. They’re not going to lay down and just let you roll right over them,” Baptista shares. “I don’t care who’s the president, that fight will continue.”
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