13. Environmental Protection Agency · Notable
Pause and review all ongoing Environmental Justice and Title VI actions
Printed page 441 13. Environmental Protection Agency
“Accordingly, the next Administration should pause and review all ongoing EJ and Title VI actions to ensure that they are consistent with any forthcoming SCOTUS decision.”
What has happened
- Partially done
Executive Order 14281 supplied the Title VI review, government-wide rather than at EPA. Section 4 directs all agencies to deprioritize enforcement of every statute and regulation to the extent it includes disparate-impact liability; section 5(a) directs the Attorney General to repeal or amend the Title VI implementing regulations for all agencies to the extent they contemplate disparate impact; and section 6(c) gives all agencies 90 days to evaluate existing consent judgments and permanent injunctions resting on disparate-impact theories and take appropriate action. Section 6(a)'s review of pending investigations and suits, however, runs only to the Attorney General and the EEOC — no order requires EPA to pause and review its own pending Title VI complaints, and EPA has published no statement that it did.
- Partially done
EPA did not pause its environmental justice work and review it; it ended it. Having placed 171 DEIA and environmental justice employees on administrative leave in the week to 2025-02-11, the agency announced on 2025-03-12 that it would terminate the Biden Administration's environmental justice and DEI arms outright, and the FY2026 reorganization addendum records that it “has eliminated environmental justice offices in the headquarters and regions” and removed the office as a national program manager. That disposes of the EJ half of the Quote by going past it. The Title VI half is untouched by these announcements: EPA's External Civil Rights Division still enforces Title VI and still maintains its complaint docket.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- The order’s operative text was read at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-04-28/html/2025-07378.htm; §§4, 5 and 6 are the ones that bear on this Quote.
- partial and not done: the Quote asks for a pause and review of all ongoing EJ and Title VI actions. The EJ side was closed rather than reviewed, and the Title VI side rests on a government-wide enforcement-priority directive, not on any EPA action on its own docket.
- EPA’s External Civil Rights page (last updated 2026-08-11) still describes an operating External Civil Rights Division with a public complaint docket, and carries only one disparate-impact constraint — the August 2024 Western District of Louisiana permanent injunction, which predates the window.
- The adjacent major ask is #1183 (Redefine Environmental Justice and review EPA’s Title VI authority), which rests on the same two instruments and is also partial; the two Quotes ask different things of them, and both are leveled the same way.
- Action
- restrict
- Object
- ongoing EPA Environmental Justice and Title VI actions
- ID
- 1184