Climate movement strikes back with first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit against EPA

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: CBS News

June 26, 2025 / 6:02 PM EDT


When Donald Trump won reelection, Jennifer Hadayia knew she'd need a good lawyer. As the executive director of Air Alliance Houston, an environmental nonprofit advocacy organization that works to reduce the risks of air pollution on public health, she had fought the first Trump administration in court already on a variety of issues.

But when Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, began terminating environmental justice grants awarded by the Biden-era EPA in January and announced "the greatest day of deregulation" in mid-March to dismantle dozens of environmental policies, Hadaiya was gobsmacked: "We are in the very worst possible situation to couple regulatory rollbacks with funding decimation."

Hadayia isn't the only one in this position. Zeldin's immediate termination of some $3 billion from the Environmental and Climate Justice block program impacted 350 environmental organizations, cities and tribes that all saw their grants evaporate without warning.

Environmental justice grants are intended to help protect people from disproportionate exposure to industrial pollutants or environmental hazards and ensure everyone has access to a healthy living environment. For instance, lower-income communities that live near factories are often more exposed to pollutants that may damage their health. Rather than sue the agency on its own, as many others are currently doing, Air Alliance Houston will be trying a new legal tactic: joining a first-of-its-kind proposed class action lawsuit against the EPA and Zeldin to restore funding.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-movement-first-of-its-kind-class-action-lawsuit-against-epa/

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Link to SUIT (PDF) - https://earthjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/case-number-25-cv-1982.pdf

[Martin68]

1. In 2020 environmental organizations successfully sued the EPA to force them to enforce the Chesapeake Bay Agreement

to clean up the Bay. The agreement was a legally binding contract signed by Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and Washington, D.C. requiring a reduction in certain pollutants being allowed to enter the bay through tributaries flowing through each state.