#justice40

You see, the Biden Administration launched the Justice 40 initiative which guarantees 40% of existing federal funding, not new money that needs to pass through Congress but real money that's already flowing, should go to historically disadvantaged census tracts. And by restricting it to census tracts it limits the ability of states, cities, and other localities to take the money and spend it on richer areas instead of the areas that really need the help as they often do.

If you're interested in which census tracts qualify for this, they've put together an interactive map that allows you to look at individual census tracts anywhere in the country and see which ones qualify and why. It's a fascinating tool!

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

A new analysis has found that the White House’s signature environmental justice program may not shrink racial disparities in who breathes the most polluted air, in part because of efforts to ensure that it could withstand legal challenges.

The program, called Justice40, aims to address inequalities by directing 40 percent of the benefits from certain federal environmental investments toward disadvantaged communities. But the Biden administration, in designing the program, purposely omitted race from the process of calculating who could benefit. The Supreme Court recently struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, a ruling that some believe could affect federal environmental programs.

Unless carefully implemented, the program may not work as hoped and could even widen the racial gap by improving the air in whiter communities, which may also be disadvantaged in some ways, faster than in communities of color, according to a peer-reviewed study published Thursday in the journal Science by researchers from several universities and environmental justice groups.

The investments included in Justice40, which span 19 federal agencies, amount to billions of dollars. “This is not just play money,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. Dr. Bullard’s research in the 1980s provided some of the earliest evidence that polluting facilities have been systematically sited near communities of color.

The researchers compared the current “business as usual” trajectory in air quality improvements with two alternative scenarios in which air quality in disadvantaged communities, as defined by the White House, improves at double or quadruple the overall rate. They found that even if PM 2.5 pollution improved faster in these broadly defined disadvantaged communities, the pollution would remain significantly worse for people of color.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Justice40 directs federal agencies to align their environmental and clean energy funding so that 40 percent of the “overall benefits” of that spending goes to “disadvantaged communities.” But since local and state governments largely dictate how the money they receive from the federal government gets used, activists say it’s unclear how a program like Justice40 will be enforced—especially in states like Texas, where Republican leadership has continued to defy federal guidance.

“I think it is sort of a cautionary tale,” Ken Kramer, who ran the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club for 23 years before retiring in 2012, said of the ongoing dispute between HUD and Texas state leadership. “Basically a lot of federal programs are being implemented directly or indirectly through state and local officials,” many of whom don’t view environmental justice as “a priority issue.”

After the HUD report in March, the Texas land office agreed to send Harris County $750 million of the roughly $1 billion in federal flood aid that Texas has so far distributed. But as the state prepares to allocate the next round of flood aid, the agency appears to be once again diverting that funding away from the Gulf Coast, where advocates say it’s most needed, a recent analysis by The Texas Tribune found.