Biden’s Environmental Justice Scorecard Offers More Questions than Answers

“Shortly after being elected president, Joe Biden made a sweeping promise on environmental justice: With a 2021 executive order, he vowed 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 compensate for both underinvestment and environmental harms that have disproportionately burdened communities of color throughout U.S. history.

Justice40 is striking both for the simplicity and specificity of its objective and also for the big open questions that the goal depends on. For one, Justice40 was conceived before hundreds of billions of dollars in climate funding were unlocked by the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s unclear what the grand total is from which the 40 percent figure will be drawn. Second, the president promised not 40 percent of spending but 40 percent of the benefits of said spending, and it’s not obvious 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 yearslong, open-source White House project, which resulted in 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 agency environmental justice performance measures.” Three years on, however, environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to expressed disappointment in the quality of this progress report, saying the administration’s scorecard is confusing and provides little information about whether or not federal funding is on track to meet Justice40’s lofty goal.

In its current iteration, the scorecard consists of links to multiple web pages detailing the various environmental justice efforts undertaken by each federal agency. Most agencies have reported whether or not they have 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 provides little insight into how much of that funding has been allocated to disadvantaged communities. Since federal agencies currently don’t have a uniform method of tracking funding down to a specific zip code, that information has not been reported. In some cases, such tracking may not even be possible. For example, when the Department of Transportation builds an electric charging station along a highway, it may be used by residents of multiple communities spread out over a large area. The corresponding air quality improvements, to the extent they can be determined, may also span a vast region. Actually quantifying such benefits — whether it’s improvements in air quality or health or any number of other outcomes — is even more challenging. As a result, an interested member of the public can, for example, 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 is going to disadvantaged communities — and the impact of those funds — is unknown”