How Trump’s Attacks on DEI Are Hurting Communities That Voted for Him

Clarksburg, West Virginia has lead service lines scattered throughout the city, which has caused elevated levels of lead in some children’s blood, resulting in health issues like developmental delays.  

In 2023, the environmental-justice division of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced a new program designed to increase lead testing for local children and families so that officials could catch elevated lead levels early and prevent long-term health complications. Partnering with cash-strapped state agencies, the EPA bought kits that could measure lead levels in children with just a finger prick, gave out gift cards to incentivize testing, and offered testing opportunities in offices where families picked up benefits and received breast-feeding support.

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The program invested $150,000 in lead-testing kits for Harrison County, where Clarksburg is located, which raised testing rates in children from about 8% to 41%, says Camilla McMillen-Haught, director of Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) Nutrition in six West Virginia counties, including Harrison. Children with high levels of lead were then targeted for health interventions like dietary changes that would reduce their risk of long-term problems.

The future of the program is now uncertain, due to the Trump Administration’s focus on rooting out efforts to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental-justice initiatives. A proposed expansion of the lead-testing program to states like Ohio is threatened as well.

The EPA staffer who spearheaded the initiative was put on administrative leave in early February as part of the Trump Administration’s purge of federal government workers. The person told TIME they were pulled into a meeting and told they had 15 minutes to log out of their work email and settle their affairs. (The staffer asked not to be named for fear of being fired permanently.) An additional 167 members of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were put on administrative leave, according to the agency, many after receiving emails that said they were identified as spending more than half their time on environmental-justice initiatives.

These moves were part of President Trump’s executive order, titled “Ending Radical and Waste Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” which he issued on his first day in office to target DEI and environmental-justice programs. (A Maryland judge on Feb. 21 largely blocked the Administration from carrying out much of the DEI executive order, though staff members and recipients of grants have not yet seen changes since then.) The Administration’s goal, it said, was to slash spending and end initiatives that single out minorities for help.

In the directive, Trump criticized his predecessor’s own executive order seeking to advance racial equity and support for underserved communities as “illegal and immoral discrimination.” New EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video posted on X Feb. 12 that “the days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.” He added, on Feb. 22, “UPDATE: I just cancelled another 21 wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants, with the help of our amazing @DOGE team, racking up $67m more in savings!”

But many of the environmental-justice programs targeted by the new Administration’s staff cuts and funding freezes do not benefit minorities or left-leaning environmental groups, according to Adam Ortiz, who until January served as the EPA’s Regional Administrator for Region 3, which includes Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Often they help poor, white communities in conservative areas—places that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

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Clarksburg, a beneficiary of the West Virginia lead-testing program, is a former manufacturing hub that is 90% white and has a poverty rate of 23.2%, about double the national average. Harrison County, where it is located, voted for Trump by a margin of 40 percentage points in 2024.

“These are communities that had the most hope in this Administration and are now feeling the most suffering,” says Jacob Israel Hannah, the CEO of Coalfield Development Corp., a nonprofit that does workforce development in 21 counties in West Virginia. Coalfield Development had won nearly $700 million in federal funding for projects across the state. Over half of its budget has come from federal grants in the past few years as the Biden Administration funneled “unprecedented” amounts of funding to Appalachia, Hannah says. But nearly all that money has been frozen by federal spending pauses targeting DEI, environmental justice, and clean-energy initiatives.

When asked about the idea that ending DEI and environmental justice activities hurts communities that supported Trump, an EPA spokesperson said in a statement to TIME that it is “working diligently” to implement President Trump’s executive orders. It placed the 168 Office of Environmental Justice employees on administrative leave after EPA career staffers determined that their functions “did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties,” the statement said. The agency is “in the process of evaluating new structure and organization to ensure we are meeting our mission of protecting human health and the environment for all Americans,” according to the statement.

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, wrote in an email to TIME that “protecting the civil rights and expanding opportunities for all Americans is a key priority of the Trump Administration, which is why he took decisive actions to terminate unlawful DEI preferences.”

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Funding freezes are another way that the Trump Administration has tried to weed out programs promoting DEI and environmental justice. One of the grants Coalfield Development Corp. won—worth around $130 million—would have created 1,000 new jobs by training unemployed coal workers to become solar installers and then to install 250 megawatts of solar on closed coal mines, says Hannah. But now, he says, when Coalfield staffers log into funding portals for the Department of Energy, the EPA, and the Department of Labor, they receive a message that their grants are “under review” and that they are not able to access the money they were promised. The grant applications included the term environmental justice because they would have helped underserved communities access jobs and clean power, Hannah says. If the grant goes away, “you will see the loss of what would have been over 1,000 new jobs in Appalachia,” Hannah says.

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While some of the beneficiaries of environmental-justice projects have been low-income communities of color in cities, others are struggling white communities in Appalachia. The Biden Administration mandated that 40% of many of its climate and clean energy funds flow to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.” It also set aside $500 million for Appalachian Community Capital to launch a Green Bank for Rural America that would have prioritized investments in 582 counties across the region. 

“The important thing to understand about all the grants at the EPA is that they prioritized reaching the communities most overburdened by pollution,” says Zealan Hoover, who was until recently the Director of Implementation at the agency, overseeing $100 billion in funding. “In every state, there was a wide range of communities receiving funding.” That includes Alaska Native communities, rural communities in the Southeast and Gulf Coast, and places across the country that have disproportionately high energy costs, Hoover says. 

Another nonprofit that saw its federal funding frozen is LiKEN (Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network), which works in Kentucky and West Virginia to help people in rural areas join global markets for sustainable agriculture and carbon capture. LiKEN received $3.1 million from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Landowners Support Program from the Inflation Reduction Act. It hired 10 staff to open satellite offices in eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia that were set to become local hubs where the community could gather, says Betsy Taylor, the group’s executive director.

On Feb. 5, the organization received a form email from the U.S. Forest Service informing the group that its federal funds “are on hold until further notice.” LiKEN had to borrow money from private donors and furlough five staff. Taylor says she has a suspicion of why the money was frozen: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was about serving underserved communities.” The vast majority of these communities were white, Taylor says.

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The Administration’s funding freeze hits communities that would have benefited at a time of urgent need. Swaths of Appalachia suffered devastating floods on Feb. 15. “One of the things that has been surreal is the contrast between the shock that the government would not be honoring contracts that were congressionally approved, and the heroism of people on the ground who lost income rushing to communities affected by the floods,” Taylor says.

Many of the programs whose funding was paused or whose federal staff were placed on administrative leave focused on providing access to clean drinking water and functioning wastewater treatment plants, says Ortiz, the former EPA regional administrator. One project, spearheaded by a staffer now on administrative leave, according to Ortiz, sought to relocate a wastewater treatment plant in Richwood, W.V., that has been basically inoperable since a 2016 flood. 

“Our environmental-justice work was really focused on places that historically didn’t have the ability to match funds or pay loans back,” Ortiz says. “For the first time since the 1930s and 1940s, these communities were receiving serious investments to rebuild critical infrastructure.” 

In Pennington Gap, Virginia, which is located in a county where 86% of voters supported Trump in 2024, the future of a grant to demolish an asbestos-filled grocery store, issued through the EPA’s Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement Program, is now in question. The nonprofit environmental group Appalachian Voices, which received the grant, can’t get in touch with its EPA program lead and can’t send out any more information to community members without EPA approval, says Emma Kelly, New Economy program coordinator for Appalachian Voices.

Other federal funding to Appalachian Voices that has been frozen includes money to close up abandoned mines, support communities battered by flooding, and monitor air quality, says Kelly. “These freezes, even if they are eventually overturned, are already having incredibly detrimental impacts,” she adds.  

Many of the EPA environmental-justice staffers put on leave are eager to get back to work—even in an Administration that seems hostile to the very idea of the work that they do. “No economy is going to be restored,” says one staffer on administrative leave, who asked not to be named because they hope to be reinstated, “if you don’t have sanitation or clean drinking water.”

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