A senior staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency resigned from the agency Thursday amid concerns that many of agency’s programs will be shuttered under the forthcoming Trump budget.
The founder of the EPA’s environmental justice office, Mustafa Ali, resigned Thursday, saying he has never seen such a concerted effort to roll back programs with a track record of helping disadvantaged and low-income communities.
The office addresses environmental challenges facing low-income communities, such as the lead-contaminated water crisis that dominated the headlines last year in Flint, Mich. Ali had served as senior adviser on environmental justice issues, after founding the office in the 1990s.
The news was first reported by the environmental news website InsideClimate.
“I never saw in the past a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on through all the previous administrations,” he said in an interview, according to the Washington Post. “I can’t be a part of anything that would hurt those [disadvantaged] communities. I just couldn’t sign off on those types of things.”
Ali said he hasn’t seen much from the Trump administration on environmental justice concerns. “I hadn’t seen any positive movement in relationship to vulnerable communities,” he said. “I hadn’t seen yet any engagement with communities with environmental justice concerns.”
In his resignation letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Ali said that when he hears about EPA considering cuts to environmental justice grant programs for hundreds of disadvantaged communities, “I wonder if our new leadership has had the opportunity to converse with those who need our help the most.”
He encouraged Pruitt and his team “to continue promoting agency efforts to validate these communities’ concerns and value their lives.”
