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Biden Plans to Pick Brenda Mallory to Lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Here’s What She Can Do to Boost Public Protections.

UPDATE: The Senate confirmed Brenda Mallory as Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality on April 14, 2021.

President-elect Joe Biden is set to name Brenda Mallory to lead the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the White House office that coordinates environmental policy across federal agencies. Mallory has more than three decades of environmental law and policy experience, served as CEQ general counsel under President Barack Obama, and is currently director of regulatory policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Though somewhat dormant during Donald Trump's early tenure, CEQ ramped up its attacks on environmental policies and protections during the second half of Trump’s term.

It focused its assault on how agencies review the environmental impacts of their actions. Congress required such environmental review beginning in 1970 with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Whenever an agency funds or issues a permit for a big project like an oil pipeline, a bridge, or a highway, NEPA requires that agency to assess its environmental harms and benefits and investigate plausible alternatives to the proposal. The climate crisis has made such review especially important. A new oil pipeline, for instance, could make carbon emissions soar by making it easier to move oil and burn it. A bridge built without proper attention to sea level rise might flood, putting lives and property at risk. The CEQ, which protects the integrity of the review process, instead spent the second half of the Trump administration hollowing it out, making sure that climate concerns got deep-sixed.

Over the years, the NEPA process also became a successful way for working-class folk to push for environmental justice by calling attention to the dangers a new proposal might foist on their already burdened neighborhoods. Trump’s CEQ took a hammer to that strategy, too. If allowed to stand, its policy moves would increase pollution and environmental health burdens for many communities of color and low-wealth families across the country.

The Biden-Harris administration and Mallory must reverse course, restore and strengthen NEPA implementation guidance, and coordinate a response to climate and environmental justice challenges that is truly government-wide.

Here are four things CEQ could do right away:

  1. Stop and reverse the Trump administration's NEPA overhaul. The White House and CEQ must slam the brakes on Trump's gutting of NEPA and restore proper implementation of the law by:
    1. Immediately repealing Executive Order 13807, which allowed the Trump administration to gut NEPA implementation.

    2. Withdrawing its guidance directing agencies to hollow out their NEPA assessments and environmental impact statements.

  2. Restore guidance on cumulative climate impacts in all NEPA reviews. Climate change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and different types of federal projects (direct, permitted, or funded) impact our climate in different ways. Assessing how specific projects may contribute to cumulative climate burdens (those caused by the combined effect of past, present, and foreseeable future activities) is essential to building pollution prevention, emissions reductions, resiliency, and other crucial environmental effects into all projects undertaken and authorized by the federal government.

  3. Restart climate adaptation planning. In addition to evaluating the cumulative climate impacts of all federal projects, the council must coordinate plans to adapt to a changing climate with all federal agencies. To achieve Biden’s “whole of government” climate goals, agencies across the executive branch must adapt land management practices, construction projects, and a wide range of energy, environmental, and other policies to the realities of climate change. The council can and should lead these efforts.

  4. Renew CEQ's environmental justice focus. The Trump administration ignored environmental justice — and that’s putting it mildly. If implemented, the council’s new NEPA policies will have serious impacts on communities of color and low-wealth families, including making it more difficult to challenge increasing health and environmental burdens forced on them by polluting projects that haven’t been adequately assessed.

    But Biden’s CEQ must go further than reversing Trump's NEPA overhaul. If the president-elect is to achieve his environmental justice goals and campaign promises, the council will need to proactively coordinate efforts across federal agencies and ensure that the existing executive order on environmental justice is fully and equitably implemented.

Trump and his CEQ appointees did significant damage to the council itself and to national environmental policy writ large. The good news is that the president, vice president, and Mallory can work together not only to repair harms done but also to empower CEQ to coordinate and facilitate smart, effective environmental justice and climate policies that work for all people and the planet.

Editor’s note: This post is part of the Center for Progressive Reform’s Policy for a Just America initiative. Learn more on CPR’s website.

Top image by Stephanie Gross for Southern Environmental Law Center, used with permission. All rights reserved.

Showing 2,923 results

Robert Verchick | December 17, 2020

Biden Plans to Pick Brenda Mallory to Lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Here’s What She Can Do to Boost Public Protections.

President-elect Joe Biden is set to name Brenda Mallory to lead the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the White House office that coordinates environmental policy across federal agencies. Mallory has more than three decades of environmental law and policy experience, served as CEQ general counsel under President Obama, and is currently director of regulatory policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Here are four things Mallory and CEQ could do right away to coordinate environmental policy across federal agencies and repair an office Donald Trump badly damaged.

Daniel Farber | December 15, 2020

Restoring Agency Norms

Donald Trump prided himself on his contempt for established norms of presidential action. Whole books have been written about how to restore those norms. Something similar also happened deeper down in the government, out in the agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that do the actual work of governance. Trump appointees have corrupted agencies and trashed the norms that support agency integrity. It will take hard work to undo the harm. White House leadership is important, but success will require dedicated effort by the agency heads appointed by Biden.

Scott Stern | December 14, 2020

A New Strategy for Indigenous Climate Refugees

In the midst of a global pandemic and increasingly desperate attempts by the Trump administration to subvert the results of the 2020 election, it would be easy to miss a slew of recent news stories on individuals the media has termed "climate refugees." These are people who have been displaced due to catastrophic climate change, or who will be forced to flee as their homes become too hot, too cold, or too dry, or if they become regular targets of massive storms or end up underwater. As many of these stories have highlighted, among those most at risk are the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Yet, there is a potential path out of climate-induced devastation.

Daniel Farber | December 11, 2020

Downstream Emissions

A recent Ninth Circuit ruling overturned approval of offshore drilling in the Arctic. The ruling may directly impact the Trump administration's plans for oil leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). By requiring agencies to consider emissions when fossil fuels are ultimately burned, the Court of Appeals' decision may also change the way agencies consider other fossil fuel projects, such as gas pipelines.

Katlyn Schmitt | December 10, 2020

Environmental Enforcement in the COVID-19 Era

Ever since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a dangerous (and now-rescinded) policy relaxing enforcement of environmental protections in March, the Center for Progressive Reform has watchdogged responses from state environmental agencies in three states in the Chesapeake Bay Region — Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. While the EPA essentially gave companies a free pass to hide pollution violations during the pandemic, most states set up processes to handle COVID-19-related noncompliance. Environmental agencies in the three states we monitored received dozens of waiver requests related to water, land, and air quality protections, pollution controls, sampling and monitoring, inspections, and critical infrastructure deadlines. A majority of these requests were related to the pandemic. But others, such as those seeking to delay important deadlines for construction projects, were not. This suggests that some polluters are using COVID-19 as an excuse to subvert or delay deadlines that prevent further air or water pollution.

Darya Minovi, Rebecca Bratspies | December 9, 2020

Will the Biden Administration Invest in Environmental Justice Reforms?

On October 22, millions of Americans watched the final presidential debate, taking in each candidate's plan for oft-discussed issues like health care, the economy, and foreign policy. Toward the end, the moderator asked the candidates how they would address the disproportionate and harmful impacts of the oil and chemical industries on people of color. President Trump largely ignored the question. But former Vice President Joe Biden addressed it head on, sharing his own experience growing up near oil refineries and calling for restrictions on "fenceline emissions" -- the pollution levels observed at the boundary of a facility's property, which too often abuts a residential neighborhood. Less than three weeks later, Biden was elected president of the United States, making it possible for him to turn his campaign promises into action.

Laurie Ristino | December 8, 2020

Democracy Is Fragile. Help Us Protect It.

At long last, we’ve reached “safe harbor” day, when states must resolve election-related disputes. Under federal law, Congress must count votes from states that meet today’s deadline. Donald Trump is essentially out of time to steal a second term; our democracy, it appears, will survive, at least for now. The last four years have been an urgent call to action to reclaim our democracy, to fix it, to reimagine it. The good news is we can use the tools of democracy to do so. The Center for Progressive Reform is launching Policy for a Just America, a major new initiative to repair and reimagine government. We’re developing a series of policy recommendations and other resources to advance justice and equity and create a sustainable future. We’re also using advocacy and media engagement tools to inform the public about the urgent need for reform and how to achieve it across all levels of government.

William Funk | December 7, 2020

HHS Proposes to Sunset Regulations It Fails to Review Retrospectively

Everyone who has studied what agencies in fact have done have concluded that agencies have largely failed in complying with varying retrospective review requirements. What is to be done? The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has a proposed answer: absent a retrospective review within a designated period, sunset the regulation.

Daniel Farber | November 20, 2020

‘Whole of Government’ Climate Policy

It's clear that EPA has a central role to play in climate policy, but EPA does not stand alone. Other agencies also have important roles to play. Fortunately, the Biden transition team seems to have come to this realization.