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Photo: Jeff Singer/Redux

When you hear about Donald Trump’s administration killing “DEI programs,” you may assume that just means fewer hiring-equality workshops or racial-sensitivity training sessions. But the sweeping assault on “diversity, equality, and inclusion” promulgated by multiple Trump executive orders is far more than a retreat from “wokeness.” It represents an aggressive effort to ban all public (and to the maximum extent possible, private) anti-discrimination efforts on grounds that they are themselves discriminatory since they benefit a particular group, however objectively and historically disadvantaged. This is far from an abstract change in orientation. Many policies and programs aimed at remediating past discrimination have been abruptly reversed and canceled.

One kind of anti-discrimination effort singled out for extinction by Trump has been “environmental justice,” the recognition that in many places poor and disadvantaged communities have suffered disproportionately from polluted air, water, and land. The task of rooting out “environmental justice” began with replacement of Biden executive orders encouraging attention to underserved areas with Trump executive orders strictly banning it. This has continued with EPA administrator Lee Zeldin plodding his way through his agency’s grants and contracts to kill any offending item. That has been very bad news for farmworkers on the Central Coast of California, as The Guardian reports:

For decades, thousands of residents in California’s agricultural heartland couldn’t use their wells because the water was too contaminated with pesticides. In December, the Biden administration stepped in with a long-awaited $20m grant to provide clean water, improve municipal sources and relieve the region’s financial and health burden.

The Trump administration just took the money away.

Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) labeled the grant a “wasteful DEI program”, though advocates say the move is an act of cruelty. Drinking water in some parts of the Monterey county region, which largely produces strawberries, has not been safe for decades because it is contaminated with staggering levels of highly toxic pesticide ingredients that threaten the health of agricultural workers and others.

Some context is helpful to understand the injustice at play here. Picking strawberries is hard physical labor, typically performed by immigrants, many undocumented, for low wages and very limited benefits at best. That this work also generates through pesticides the poisoning of these same workers’ drinking water is especially tragic. The area in Monterey County that the federal-state grant would have helped has been beset recently by deadly flooding and also by dangerous emissions from a battery-factory fire. It’s also within a short commute — just across the Monterey Bay — to the extremely wealthy enclaves of Pebble Beach and Carmel-by-the-Sea. The gross inequality that “environmental justice” policies are designed to expose and address are on vivid display here every day.

A query about the impact of this grant cancellation by Inside Climate News drew this inexplicably angry response from the EPA:

“Maybe the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the grant’s remit to fund environmental and climate justice under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Declaring ideological warfare on modest and grossly overdue help to provide safe drinking water is a sign of MAGA gone wild, not to mention a determination to whitewash the cold, hard facts of current and historic discrimination. Perhaps the new bosses at the EPA look at the strawberry pickers of Monterey County and just see potential targets for future ICE raids living in a state they’ve been taught to loathe. But it would be good to remember this situation next time you hear that Trump 2.0 is simply reining in the “woke” excesses of the Biden administration.

Trump Fights DEI by Making Farmworkers Drink Polluted Water

Trump Fights DEI by Making Farmworkers Drink Polluted Water