Text of Letter (PDF)

Washington (January 27, 2023) – Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Congresswoman Cori Bush (MO-01) led their colleagues Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Representatives Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Nanette Barragán (CA-44), Greg Casar (TX-35), James P. McGovern (MA-02), Jamaal Bowman (D-16), and Gwen Moore (WI-04) in a letter to White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Chair Brenda Mallory providing recommendations for developing a comprehensive, accessible, and transparent Environmental Justice (EJ) Scorecard to measure and monitor the progress federal agencies have made in advancing environmental justice. In August 2022, CEQ issued a request for information soliciting feedback in developing an EJ Scorecard – as directed by an Executive Order issued by President Biden early in his term.

“As strong supporters of environmental justice, we understand that the first version of the EJ Scorecard will establish a baseline by which to measure progress toward our shared environmental justice goals,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter to CEQ Chair Mallory. “We urge CEQ to develop a scorecard that is transparent and accessible, incorporates available data that measures and illustrates the effectiveness of federal funding in EJ communities, incorporates community-produced data, and presents the data in an actionable way so that agencies can use them to drive rulemakings and investments.”

Specifically, the lawmakers’ recommendations stress the need for CEQ to provide the public access to the forthcoming EJ Scorecard through partnerships with public libraries, community centers, and non-profit organizations, and to ensure that stakeholders, regardless of disability status or language barriers, can meaningfully participate in the EJ scoring process through regional in-person, virtual, and hybrid feedback opportunities. In the letter, the lawmakers asked that CEQ include a wide variety of metrics and qualitative feedback in the scorecard, including quantifiable community engagement opportunities, and track agency spending in order to evaluate which communities are benefiting from federal funding. The lawmakers also affirmed the need for CEQ to gather feedback from communities on the Biden administration’s Justice40 programs and other federal investments as part of the EJ scoring process.

“In the long term, the EJ Scorecard should measure and show how the entire federal government integrates community input, and how that reform served communities and improved their economic, health, and environmental conditions,” the lawmakers concluded.

Senator Markey is at the forefront of efforts to urge the Biden administration, including CEQ, to uphold environmental justice commitments, including:

1. In November, CEQ released its enhanced Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, which incorporated key recommendations made by Senator Markey and his colleagues in an April letter to CEQ, including adopting more metrics that indicate the interrelation between race and climate vulnerability, transit, clean energy, energy efficiency, and housing; developing a plan for public engagement and Tribal nation consultation that includes a way to factor community feedback into the tool; and developing a methodology for cumulative environmental justice scores that look at the aggregated hardships within a community.
2. In September, Senator Markey and his colleagues Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (NY-12), Ro Khanna (CA-17), Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), and Cori Bush (MO-01) led their colleagues in a letter to CEQ and its White House counterparts urging them to strengthen the Biden administration’s implementation of the Justice40 Initiative and to make clear that the plan’s 40 percent target “is a funding floor, not a ceiling.”
3. In August, Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $32.5 million in funding Senator Markey and Congresswoman Bush fought to secure for the development and dissemination of an environmental justice mapping and screening tool at CEQ.
4. In April, Senator Markey led his colleagues in writing CEQ with a request to strengthen the beta version of the tool with several recommendations, which included adopting more metrics that indicate the interrelation between race and climate vulnerability, transit, clean energy, energy efficiency, and housing; developing a plan for public engagement and Tribal nation consultation that includes a way to factor community feedback into the tool; and developing a methodology for cumulative environmental justice scores that look at the aggregated hardships within a community. Many of these recommendations were directly built into the 1.0 version of the CEJST, and CEQ has committed to continuing to work with communities and experts to develop a methodology for cumulative impacts for subsequent versions of the tools.

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