Type the old EJScreen address into a browser and nothing loads. The tool was there in January 2025. By the first week of February it was gone.
That is a small, checkable fact, and it is the easiest way into a subject that usually arrives wrapped in argument. Between January 2025 and March 2026, the federal machinery built around the phrase “environmental justice” came apart through a sequence of executive orders, agency actions and one lawsuit. All of it sits in the public record.
What the 1994 order required, and what it did not
Executive Order 12898 is short. Signed 11 February 1994, it creates no new agency, no new permit and no new penalty.
Its operative sentence is Section 1-101. Executive Order 12898 directed that “each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission,” then said how: by identifying and addressing disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies and activities on minority populations and low-income populations. The direction applied only to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law.
Two things about that sentence usually get dropped.
The first is the limit the order placed on itself. Section 6-609 says the order “shall not be construed to create any right to judicial review” over compliance by the United States, and that it creates no right or benefit enforceable at law or in equity against the government. Nobody could sue to enforce it. That was written into the text from the start.
The second is that the order never defines its own key terms. It uses “minority population” and “low-income population” repeatedly and defines neither.
So for 31 years, federal environmental justice practice ran on a presidential management directive with no statutory definitions and no cause of action. That describes the kind of instrument it was, and it explains a lot about what came next.
The documentary record of 2025 and 2026
The dates matter here because several things that are often merged happened separately.
On 20 January 2025, Executive Order 14148 revoked Executive Order 14008 of January 2021 at its Section 2(s). EO 14008 carried the Justice40 goal, under which 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal investments were meant to flow to disadvantaged communities. A separate order the same day, EO 14151, told agencies to end environmental justice offices and positions to the maximum extent allowed by law, according to the Congressional Research Service.
On 21 January 2025, Executive Order 14173 was signed, and published 31 January 2025 at 90 FR 8633. Its Section 3(a) opens a list of revoked executive actions. Item (i) on that list is Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994, named by number, date and full title.
Around 22 January 2025, the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, known as CEJST, stopped being available on the White House website. Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program tracker dates it to that day: EO 14148 had rescinded the order directing CEQ to build it.
On 5 February 2025, two weeks later and through a different chain, EPA removed EJScreen. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative documented the removal item by item with paired Internet Archive snapshots from before and after: the landing page, the mapper, the download page, the server distributing the spatial data and the training pages. Anyone can check those snapshots.
The litigation is often misreported. On 14 April 2025, four groups filed Sierra Club v. EPA in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 1:25-cv-01112, challenging the removal of six federal sites under the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. This was a district court case, not an appeals court case.
Not every removal stuck. The Department of Energy reposted its Low-Income Energy Affordability Data tool on 3 June 2025, and the plaintiffs dropped DOE from the suit on 1 July. The court denied a preliminary injunction on 9 July 2025, then dismissed the case for lack of standing, finding the groups had not shown a legal right to the information they sought. The dismissal order is stamped 11 March 2026, Civil Action No. 25-1112 (RC), Judge Rudolph Contreras. Harvard’s tracker gives 13 March 2026. Both dates circulate and this article does not pick between them.
One more discrepancy sits inside the official analysis rather than the press. A Congressional Research Service product dated 24 February 2025 attributes the revocation of EO 12898 to EO 14173. A second CRS product dated 15 July 2025 attributes it to EO 14148. The orders themselves name EO 12898 in EO 14173’s Section 3(a) list and not in EO 14148’s Section 2 list.
What the Government Accountability Office found
GAO is the audit arm of Congress, and its reports are the closest thing to a neutral account of how federal environmental justice practice worked.
GAO-19-543, published 16 September 2019, is titled “Environmental Justice: Federal Efforts Need Better Planning, Coordination, and Methods to Assess Progress.” Its finding was about process, not outcomes. Most agencies had written environmental justice strategic plans, but only six had updated them recently. Few had measures or methods for assessing progress, the interagency working group had not issued guidance, and the number of agencies publishing annual progress reports had been falling. GAO made 24 recommendations.
The afterlife of those recommendations is the cleanest institutional fact available. All 24 are now closed: 18 as implemented, two as not implemented, and four as no longer valid. GAO’s stated reason for those four is that the January 2025 executive orders revoked the underlying environmental justice orders.
A second GAO report lands on the other side of the policy change and is just as unflattering to a simple story. GAO-25-107516, published 9 September 2025, looked back at Justice40, under which 19 agencies had identified 518 covered programs by November 2023.
GAO’s conclusion was that with the initiative terminated in January 2025, the overall results of agency actions remain unknown. As of December 2024, none of EPA, Interior, USDA or the Office of Management and Budget had reported what benefits resulted, how they were measured, or how much funding reached disadvantaged communities. GAO adds that the measurement problem was genuinely hard: benefits spread across different geographies and timeframes, can be hard to attribute, and may take years to show up.
The statutes did not change
This is the part with the most practical consequence and the least coverage.
CRS explains the distinction in its September 2023 product on EPA’s role. Executive orders generally do not establish federal law. They are presidential directives for managing executive departments and agencies, telling them how to implement law that already exists. The environmental statutes that authorize EPA to write regulations do not name environmental justice as a criterion for agency decisions; they address protection of human health and the environment regardless of population demographics. Legislation requiring agencies to consider environmental justice has been introduced in multiple Congresses and has not been enacted.
In February 2025, CRS stated the consequence directly: revoking the earlier executive orders does not change EPA’s responsibilities under the pollution control statutes. The Clean Air Act monitoring network, the Toxics Release Inventory’s reporting requirement and the Safe Drinking Water Act‘s reporting rules all sit in statute. That is why the lookup tools below still work.
What EJScreen measured, and where that data is now
EJScreen combined environmental and demographic indicators for very small geographies, down to the census block group, and reported them as percentiles.
Version 2.3 came out in July 2024. EPA’s change log, preserved in the agency’s 19 January 2025 snapshot, lists what moved. It added two environmental indicators, nitrogen dioxide built from NASA satellite data and drinking water non-compliance, plus map layers for extreme heat, private drinking wells, drinking water area boundaries, air toxics cancer risk and EPA environmental justice grants.
Version changes were not purely additive, which is worth knowing before anyone calls 2.3 a high-water mark. The air toxics respiratory hazard index dataset is no longer available in it, and EPA deleted version 2.2 outright.
EPA’s limitations page is the most useful document for reading the tool honestly, and it is EPA’s own voice. The agency said EJScreen was built to highlight places that might be candidates for further review, analysis or outreach. It is not a detailed risk analysis. Its environmental indicators are only screening-level stand-ins for actual health impacts, the proximity measures especially, and estimates for a single block group carry real uncertainty. EPA warned that basing a key decision on any screening tool is generally not appropriate. An account that treats the removal as the loss of an authoritative answer misstates what EPA said the tool was.
The data itself is in a different position from the website. Works of the US federal government are generally not under copyright, so the underlying files could be copied lawfully and republished. The University of Chicago’s Knowledge repository holds version 2.3 under DOI 10.6082/z7nbk-5bk41, with block group and tract data, a data dictionary and the technical documentation, described in the record as part of a federal data rescue project run at the university in January and February 2025. A volunteer coalition called Public Environmental Data Partners runs a partial reconstruction returning index percentiles for a block group.
The aggregator went away. The federal datasets it aggregated did not.
Exposure is measured, and health effects are inferred
These are two tiers of evidence, and most writing on this subject slides from one to the other without saying so.
Differential exposure is the better-established tier. Mikati and colleagues assigned facilities in EPA’s 2011 National Emissions Inventory to nearby block groups. For fine particles, people in poverty carried 1.35 times the burden of the overall population, non-white residents 1.28 times, and Black residents 1.54 times. The pattern held nationally and within most states and counties. Two of the five authors were EPA scientists.
Jbaily and colleagues, writing in Nature, linked demographics to fine particle levels across roughly 32,000 ZIP code tabulation areas from 2000 to 2016. Areas with higher-than-average white and Native American populations were consistently exposed to lower average levels than areas with higher-than-average Black, Asian and Hispanic or Latino populations. The authors state plainly that the study is observational and cannot explain the pattern.
Three findings complicate that picture, and leaving them out would misrepresent the field. Liu and colleagues examined six criteria pollutants for 1990, 2000 and 2010. In every year and for every pollutant, the group with the highest national average exposure was a racial or ethnic minority group. Over those two decades, national absolute racial and ethnic disparities in exposure fell by between 35 and 88 percent. Size also depends enormously on which pollutant you pick: in 2010 the largest gap between the most and least exposed group was 54 percent for one pollutant and 3.6 percent for another.
Lane and colleagues matched 1930s federal mortgage security maps to 2010 air pollution estimates in 202 US cities. Pollution tracked those grades closely, with nitrogen dioxide rising more than 50 percent between the best-graded and worst-graded neighborhoods. Nationally, differences within cities were larger by historical grade than by race and ethnicity, while racial and ethnic differences persisted inside every grade.
A 2026 paper by Koolik and colleagues explains why published numbers differ so much. Using the same concentration and population data, choices about exposure metric, study geography and reference population can change both the size and the ordering of estimated disparities. Several of its authors produced the headline disparity findings, which makes that caution hard to wave away.
Attributed health effects are the harder tier. A 2024 cohort study by Luo and colleagues followed 210,554 participants and recorded 954 heart attacks and 1,407 strokes. Moving from 6 to 10 micrograms per cubic metre of fine particles, the stroke hazard ratio was 1.13 in less-deprived areas, with a confidence interval from 0.85 to 1.51 that crosses no effect, against 2.57 in more-deprived areas. Neighborhood deprivation was a stronger modifier than income or race and ethnicity. Exposure was assigned at the three-digit ZIP level, which is coarse.
A 2024 case-crossover study by Shupler and colleagues of 118,632 Medicaid recipients found a 10 microgram rise in fine particles only marginally associated with stillbirth overall, the week-long estimate crossing no effect. Among Black individuals that estimate was 9.26 percent, interval 3.12 to 15.77. The intervals belong in any honest summary of findings like these.
Drinking water follows the pattern. McDonald and Jones analyzed Safe Drinking Water Act violations from 2011 to 2015 with the county served as the unit of analysis, and found the most consistent association was with the share of uninsured residents. That is a study of counties, not households.
Federal tools you can use this week
Every item below was opened and checked on 20 October 2026. Reading the Air Quality Index day to day, and the standards behind it, are separate subjects covered elsewhere on this site.
EPA ECHO, at echo.epa.gov, is the compliance and enforcement database. You can search by city, state and ZIP code, or by facility name or identifier, and filter by air, wastewater, biosolids, industrial stormwater, hazardous waste or drinking water. A separate search covers enforcement cases. The feature almost nobody knows about is ECHO Notify, which sends free weekly email alerts about new compliance and enforcement activity in an area you choose.
TRI toxics tracker is EPA’s current front end for the Toxics Release Inventory. On 20 October it was serving the 2024 National Analysis Dataset, released November 2025. You can search by street address with a radius, 10 miles by default and expandable to 100, or by state, county, city, ZIP code, metro area, watershed or tribal land. Results cover reporting years 2015 through 2024.
AirNow and EPA AirData. AirNow needs a location before it shows anything, so a blank dial on first load is normal rather than a fault. EPA’s outdoor air quality data site, last updated 7 October 2026, carries monitor data for the United States, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
Your drinking water report. This is the highest-value, lowest-effort item here, and most people do not know they are owed it. EPA requires community water systems to deliver a Consumer Confidence Report to customers, and EPA’s consumer page, last updated 21 November 2025, states the reports must be sent each year by 1 July. If yours did not arrive, call the supplier or use EPA’s search tool, which looks up reports by primacy agency, water system name and city, town or county. Two cautions, both from EPA: that search page’s footer reads last updated 19 May 2017, and reports for all water systems may not be available. If you are on a private well, nobody reports for you and testing is your responsibility.
How’s my waterway, described on an EPA page last updated 21 November 2025, works at community, state and national levels. At community level it reports local watershed water quality, designations for swimming, fish eating and aquatic life, permitted dischargers, identified impairments and discharge violations, and local drinking water and monitoring information.
EnviroAtlas carries broad-scale data for the lower 48 states and fine-scale data for selected communities only, which disappoints people in most of the country. Its Compare My Area tool summarizes your watershed or census tract against the surrounding county and state. The interactive map page was last updated 2 September 2026, and EPA’s hub page warns that EnviroAtlas web services will be removed and replaced during a move to a new application, so saved links may break.
CDC’s national environmental public health tracking network was not usable on 20 October 2026. The site showed a notice that its National Environmental Data Explorer and embedded visuals were down for planned maintenance. Retry it rather than relying on it.
Reading what you find without over-reading it
Five questions make almost any number from these tools more useful. They are the difference between information and alarm.
- What geography does this describe? A block group, a ZIP code and a county are wildly different things, and a number attached to one tells you little about the others.
- How old is it? Release data is reported annually and lags. The 2024 inventory came out in November 2025.
- Is it measured or modeled? Both are useful and they are not the same claim.
- Is it a release or an exposure? A facility reporting a release is reporting what left the stack or the pipe, not a dose anyone received.
- Does it say anything about me? Mostly, no. Every tool here describes a place, not a person.
That last point is where professional help beats more searching. If your water report shows a violation, your state drinking water program handles it, and your utility must tell customers what it is doing. If you are on a private well, arrange testing through a state-certified laboratory. If someone in your household has asthma or another lung condition and their symptoms line up with particular days or a particular place, write the dates down and take them to their clinician. A screening map cannot diagnose anybody, and nothing here is medical advice.
The 1994 executive order no longer exists. The Clean Air Act, the Toxics Release Inventory’s reporting requirement and the Safe Drinking Water Act’s reporting rules do, and they are what keeps these tools fed. That is the working difference between a policy and a statute. It is also why the most useful thing you can do about any of this has nothing to do with policy: find your water report, and read the violations table first.
Sources
- Federal Register. “Executive Order 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity (90 FR 8633).” federalregister.gov
- U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration. “Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.” transit.dot.gov
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Environmental Justice: Federal Efforts Need Better Planning, Coordination, and Methods to Assess Progress (GAO-19-543).” gao.gov
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. “Environmental Justice: Agency Actions to Implement Past Justice40 Initiative (GAO-25-107516).” gao.gov
- Congressional Research Service (via EveryCRSReport). “Trump Administration Environmental-Justice-Related Executive Orders: Potential Implications for EPA Programs (IF12922).” everycrsreport.com
- Congressional Research Service (via EveryCRSReport). “Role of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Environmental Justice (IF10529).” everycrsreport.com
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (19 January 2025 web snapshot). “Limitations and Caveats in Using EJScreen.” 19january2025snapshot.epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (19 January 2025 web snapshot). “EJScreen Change Log.” 19january2025snapshot.epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO).” echo.epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “TRI Toxics Tracker.” edap.epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) Program.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Consumer Confidence Reports: Information for Consumers.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Find Your Local Consumer Confidence Report.” sdwis.epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Outdoor Air Quality Data.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and partners. “AirNow.” airnow.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “How's My Waterway.” epa.gov
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “EnviroAtlas Interactive Map.” epa.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.” ephtracking.cdc.gov
- Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia Law School. “Sierra Club v. EPA, No. 1:25-cv-01112 (D.D.C.).” climatecasechart.com
- Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “Federal Environmental Justice Tracker: EPA Removed EJScreen.” eelp.law.harvard.edu
- University of Chicago Knowledge repository. “Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (EJScreen), DOI 10.6082/z7nbk-5bk41.” knowledge.uchicago.edu
- Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. “EPA Removes EJScreen Environmental Justice Mapping and Screening Tool.” envirodatagov.org
- Public Environmental Data Partners. “EPA EJScreen (reconstruction of version 2.3).” screening-tools.com
- PubMed. “Mikati I, et al. "Disparities in Distribution of Particulate Matter Emission Sources by Race and Poverty Status." American Journal of Public Health, 2018. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.304297.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Jbaily A, et al. "Air pollution exposure disparities across US population and income groups." Nature, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04190-y.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Liu J, et al. "Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure in the United States by Race/Ethnicity and Income, 1990-2010." Environmental Health Perspectives, 2021. DOI: 10.1289/EHP8584.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Lane HM, et al. "Historical Redlining Is Associated with Present-Day Air Pollution Disparities in U.S. Cities." Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 2022. DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.1c01012.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Koolik LH, et al. "Methodological Design Choices Can Affect Air Pollution Exposure Disparity Estimates." Environmental Science & Technology, 2026. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5c10796.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Luo J, et al. "Contextual Deprivation, Race and Ethnicity, and Income in Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Disease." JAMA Network Open, 2024. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.29137.” doi.org
- PubMed. “Shupler M, et al. "The association of short-term increases in ambient PM2.5 and temperature exposures with stillbirth." American Journal of Epidemiology, 2024. DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwae083.” doi.org
- PubMed. “McDonald YJ, Jones NE. "Drinking Water Violations and Environmental Justice in the United States, 2011-2015." American Journal of Public Health, 2018. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2018.304621.” doi.org