For twenty years, Food & Water Watch has fought for a livable future for all. But long histories of unfair policies and prejudice have stood in the way of that goal. Across the United States, people of color, low-income folks, immigrants, and rural communities face more pollution and less support in addressing health and environmental threats. Environmental justice projects and policies seek to change this — but the Musk-Trump administration is rolling back these efforts. Make no mistake, this puts lives at risk. 

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are breaking with decades of federal precedent incorporating environmental justice into agency actions. They’re pulling key programs and staff that make communities healthier and safer. They’ve slashed environmental justice staff, shuttered entire offices, taken down data tools, and frozen funds for projects set to improve communities’ health. 

Notably, the administration held back a reported $19 billion of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding, including for environmental justice projects — even after a Court ordered that it release them. Disaster recovery and resilience, workforce training, pollution reduction projects, and energy efficiency upgrades in environmental justice communities have ground to a halt.

At a time when our food, water, and climate are all in crisis, these cuts are cruel and dangerous. We’re opposing them at every turn and working with allies on the frontlines to win real improvements despite them.

How Injustice Creates Environmental Crises Across the U.S.

Nationwide, communities harmed by racism, classism, discrimination, and disinvestment experience greater health and environmental threats. These environmental justice communities are more likely to lack access to clean water, bear the brunt of climate change, and face more pollution from facilities like factory farms. 

For example, racist “redlining” policies from the mid-1900s denied Black families loans to buy homes and kept communities segregated. Many redlined Black communities received less public investment than white ones. The legacy of those policies lives on into the present. Now, formerly redlined communities experience more pollution from highways, industrial plants, and landfills sited nearby. They have worse air quality and fewer green spaces.

Corporations and their allies in government have taken advantage of environmental justice communities for decades, sacrificing their health for profits. People living near polluting facilities are treated as expendable. 

Environmental justice means correcting these harms and ensuring these communities have the same right to a healthy environment as anyone else. It means ensuring no one bears an unfair burden of pollution, and everyone can equally enjoy the benefits of environmental policies, like clean energy, good jobs, and safe water, air, and food. 

From our founding, justice has been at the heart of Food & Water Watch campaigns. From fossil fuel power plants to factory farming to water privatization, we have battled threats that disproportionately impact low-income communities and communities of color. And we’ve supported and elevated grassroots partners on the frontlines of these fights.

Now, with Musk, Trump, and their allies tearing environmental justice programs apart, it’s more important than ever for us to stand with frontline communities and fight for a livable future for everyone. Here’s how we’re doing just that:

Ending Toxic Lead Contamination in Our Drinking Water

Nationwide, 9 million homes and buildings get water from toxic lead service lines. But this major health threat isn’t experienced equally. Communities of color are at higher risk of lead exposure through drinking water. 

The majority-Black residents of Flint, Michigan (which made headlines for its lead-in-water crisis) still do not have trustworthy water more than a decade after the crisis began. Officials have not kept their promises to replace all the lead pipes, said Flint activist Melissa Mays on the 10-year anniversary last year: “We still have discolored water; the water still smells bad. We’re exhausted, we’re tired, most of us are sick.”

Years of advocacy from grassroots groups and impacted community members like Melissa have pushed this issue to the national stage. We’ve supported these efforts, and the Biden administration finally started addressing this crisis nationwide with funding for lead service line replacement in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Notably, it also released a long-overdue overhaul of the regulation for lead in drinking water, requiring nearly all lead service lines nationwide to be replaced in ten years. 

This Lead Out of Water rule will have profound public health benefits. It will prevent an estimated 1,500 cases of premature death from heart disease and 900,000 low-weight births.

But now, House Republicans have introduced legislation to roll it back. If successful, they’ll endanger the health of millions of families and could prevent the EPA from mandating full lead line replacements ever again. 

We’re going all-out to stop this rollback. In key districts across the country, we’re calling lawmakers to stand up for their constituents and oppose it. Food & Water Watch will continue working with communities to fight toxic lead in their drinking water. Environmental justice communities like Flint have suffered for far too long.

Fighting Dangerous Incentives For Polluting Factory Farms

Factory farms, which warehouse hundreds to millions of animals in tight quarters, make terrible neighbors. They amass enormous quantities of waste, producing dangerous air and water pollution. Nearby communities (disproportionately Black, Brown, and low-income) suffer from higher rates of asthma and other health problems. 

This is a major reason why we call for an end to factory farming. But polluting corporations and their allies are pushing greenwashing policies to expand the factory farm model.

In California, we’re fighting the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS). This program treats biogas from factory farm waste as a “clean” fuel and lavishes factory farms with lucrative subsidies to produce it using digesters. 

Not only is this bad for the climate; it incentivizes more factory farm waste, more factory farms, and more pollution for their neighbors, especially for majority-Latino communities in the Central Valley already exposed to some of the worst air and water quality in the nation.

“In the Central Valley, we live near 90% of cows in California and some of the largest dairy operations in the entire world,” says María Arévalo, a representative of Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio. “We raise time and time again that the conditions and impacts in our communities are getting worse as dairies are getting bigger and dairy digesters are installed.”

Factory farms across the country — not just in California — can and do get lavishly rewarded by LCFS. Nationwide, environmental justice communities are under threat from an LCFS-fueled factory farm buildout.

With allies including Defensores, we’re fighting the LCFS program in the courts. In pushing this program, California leaders are endangering vulnerable communities across the country. While Musk-Trump wreaks havoc at the federal level, Governor Gavin Newsom and the state must step up and defend public health and environmental justice. 

Stopping Dirty Fossil Fuel Projects

Many environmental justice communities face pollution from several different sources at once, compounding bad health impacts. For example, Newark, New Jersey’s Ironbound neighborhood is majority-working class, with a high immigrant population. Nearby highways, an international airport, heavy industry, a major trash incinerator, and three power plants pollute the neighborhood’s air. 

This has led to higher rates of asthma and other health problems among Ironbound residents. And the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission (PVSC) aims to add to this count with a new gas-fired power plant. 

The Ironbound is not alone. Fossil fuel projects throughout New Jersey, from power plants to liquefied natural gas export terminals, have endangered environmental justice communities. Over the past few years, we’ve worked with local groups and activists to successfully stop three of them. 

But while Governor Phil Murphy has talked a big game about clean energy and environmental justice, he has stayed silent on many of these polluting projects. 

“The clean energy that Governor Murphy has talked about so much should not only be for the big corporations and millionaires — the immigrant and poor communities should have access to this clean energy,” said New Labor organizer Reynalda Cruz Perez at a 2024 Climate Action Gathering.

Currently, that’s not happening. Many low-income, Black, Brown, and immigrant communities are facing the prospect of more fossil fuels and pollution, not less. Governor Murphy and other state leaders must step up to prevent more harm to these communities and work toward a clean energy future that benefits everyone.

With You, We Will Keep Fighting for Environmental Justice For All

Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s actions against our most basic environmental and public health protections are abhorrent, and they put all our shared food, water, environment, and health in danger.

Corporate interests want to divide us, pit us against each other, and exploit differences to maintain their power — this is what Trump is doing with his attacks on immigrants and the trans community and his coded language about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

We won’t let them do this. With supporters like you, Food & Water Watch is working to defend against attacks on communities and the environment. From coast to coast, we’re allying with people on the frontlines of pollution to fight for their health and safety. 

State and local policy can protect our food, water, and climate from more pollution. And we can stop dirty projects, like factory farms and gas-fired power plants, to protect environmental justice communities. 

Despite the Musk-Trump chaos, we can make progress on environmental justice and deliver real improvements to people’s lives. For twenty years, Food & Water Watch has fought and won against corporate polluters to defend our communities. We will continue to do so, no matter who’s in office.