View article

T he United States’ authoritarian tendencies demonstrated by and reproduced in the wake of the 2016 federal elections manifested in environmental policy and the data infrastructures that surround it. A series of executive orders by President Trump and directives from US Environmental Protection Agency (epa) administrators desperately sought to shore up the structures of racial capitalism by dispossessing marginalized communities of their environmental and informational rights. Such efforts reflected intensified corporate influence on regulatory processes and included introducing lobbyists to—and removing staff scientists from—epa advisory boards; the creation of a panel to question established climate data, a proposal that would have effectively prevented the epa from using public health data in rule-making; and cuts to environmental programs that protect minorities and vulnerable populations. While President Biden’s administration subsequently responded to these actions with a larger budget for the epa, centering environmental and climate justice in policy, and declaring its faith in science, such responses do not necessarily undo long-standing declines in funding, capacity, and accountability that the Trump administration exacerbated, raising questions about the value and integrity of federal environmental information and concerns about public access to data and the continuity of data collection. In response to these political challenges, a consensus-based, geographically distributed organization of academics, professionals, and organizers known as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (edgi) formed in November 2016 …