The second Trump administration’s disastrous early-term actions do nothing to address the economic inequality that our political classes have long ignored. In its first two weeks, the administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, reversed federal initiatives on environmental justice, withheld public health information, frozen spending on environmental and climate mitigation programs, threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, and just recently threatened to fire more than 1,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers who focus on climate and environmental enforcement.
These actions and more have attacked our Constitution, our federal institutions, public servants, immigrants and workers, and our basic civil rights. They have inflicted unnecessary — but intentional — violence and chaos onto the American people, and they will only make the cost-of-living crisis and our quality of life worse.
These hostile actions will only continue to escalate and endanger us as the Trump administration continues to implement Project 2025, which is designed to benefit no one except billionaires, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests. The administration has presented the American people with a false choice: we must choose between a safe environment for our families and communities, or economic opportunity. But what they have given us is, in fact, a lose-lose proposition for the working class that will only worsen the threats against our safety, health, and autonomy.
These actions also run counter to the most fundamental feature of a representative government: that it should serve its people. It is the government’s job to protect our health and safety. It is the government’s job to defend us from the destabilizing impacts of rising global temperatures. And it is the government’s job to immediately address climate change to secure a stable and livable climate and preserve it for future generations.
For decades, presidents and lawmakers in both houses of Congress worked in a bipartisan manner across the three co-equal branches of government to uphold and improve federal laws, plans, policies, rules, and programs to hold polluters accountable and protect Americans in both red and blue states from dirty air, water, and toxic waste. These were hard-fought victories won by civil rights leaders and members of environmental justice communities that have benefited all Americans, and they must be celebrated, not dismantled.
The Center for Progressive Reform opposes the Trump administration's destructive actions and remains steadfast alongside environmental justice communities and our allies in our commitment to harnessing the power of law, public policy, and collective action to advance a vision in which every family and community can prosper in a safe and healthy environment with clean air, water, and soil and where no one is overburdened by waste and pollution.
This work must, and will, continue.
There are many ways you can show up for environmental and social justice and work to change the material conditions where you live. Here are just a few.
Showing 2,911 results
Center for Progressive Reform | February 3, 2025
The second Trump administration’s disastrous early-term actions do nothing to address the economic inequality that our political classes have long ignored. In its first two weeks, the administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords, reversed federal initiatives on environmental justice, withheld public health information, frozen spending on environmental and climate mitigation programs, threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, and just recently threatened to fire more than 1,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers who focus on climate and environmental enforcement.
James Goodwin | February 3, 2025
Late Friday night, while news about Elon Musk’s apparent unconstitutional purge of the Office Personnel Management was beginning to trickle out, President Trump quietly announced his promised executive order calling on agencies to eliminate 10 existing “rules” for every new rule they want to institute.
Brian Gumm, Bryan Dunning, Catalina Gonzalez, Federico Holm, James Goodwin, Minor Sinclair, Rachel Mayo, Sophie Loeb, Spencer Green, Tara Quinonez | January 30, 2025
We at the Center for Progressive Reform cannot sit idly by and watch the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on the transgender community here in the United States and around the world. The Center’s staff condemns the Trump administration’s attacks on the transgender community — especially trans children.
Daniel Farber | January 29, 2025
In recent days, President Donald Trump has said that he won’t provide relief for the Los Angeles fires unless California changes its voting laws and its water regulations. He also suggested that he’d like to abolish FEMA entirely. The first of Trump’s proposals is likely unconstitutional. The second one is both a terrible idea and beyond his legal authority.
Daniel Farber | January 28, 2025
A sleeper provision in one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders attempts to revolutionize the way the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) operates and cut environmental review to a minimum.
Sophie Loeb | January 28, 2025
On December 11, 2024, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, 40 folks attended the first annual rural clean energy convening co-sponsored by the Center for Progressive Reform and the Center for Energy Education. Attendees included FEMA representatives, USDA and other government agency officials, local residents, county commissioners, and energy policy advocates. The main topic of the […]
James Goodwin, Rena Steinzor | January 27, 2025
The U.S. Congress is back and the U.S. House of Representatives is already roiling, as exemplified by the lobbyists and pundits who trail members and staff through the halls and into their offices. Republicans are already desperate to regain momentum after tripping out of the starting gate, even astride their newly minted control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue—a “trifecta” in Washington lexicon. Many backroom negotiations are inevitable, and the idea that a massive legislative package will be easier to pass could run into the reality that members will want innumerable concessions to take tough votes. The process will bog down, and Republicans must find something else to do. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has already fingered the most promising possibility—killing Biden Administration rules under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The CRA allows narrow majorities in Congress to pass “resolutions of disapproval” for recently issued final rules.
Federico Holm | January 27, 2025
If there were any doubts about the policy priorities of the second Trump administration, these have been swiftly clarified after the first barrage of executive orders (EOs) aimed at deconstructing environmental, scientific, and democratic safeguards. One of the most extensive EOs is titled “Unleashing American Energy,” which contains a wide array of actions aimed at boosting “America’s affordable and reliable energy and natural resources.” This is merely coded language for doubling down on an extractive model of development poised to pump, mine, and log every possible inch of American public lands. Unsurprisingly, it is also aimed at “unleashing” only some types of energy resources: fossil fuels.
Bryan Dunning, Federico Holm | January 22, 2025
Widely available clean drinking water is something that we usually take for granted. One of the main reasons is that the vast majority of the U.S. population has access to public water systems, which are in charge of providing safe drinking water to their users. However, in many parts of the country, particularly rural communities, people rely on private wells for sourcing their drinking water, which broadly lack regulatory safeguards for public health and well-being. This is particularly striking in Virginia, where 22 percent of the population relies on water supplied by a private well, with the share of private well use reaching upwards of 80 percent of the population in the Commonwealth’s most rural counties. As we explore in a new report, there is little comprehensive information on the distribution and severity of nitrate contamination in private well systems in Virginia.