Bradley Campbell, president of CLF, is clear-eyed about the environmental challenges we face in 2025. Photo: Courtesy CLF
Since his inauguration, President Trump has issued an unprecedented number of executive orders, many of which flagrantly violate the Constitution. He has rushed to dismantle legal mechanisms that protect our health, safety, and environment while reversing progress on clean energy. He has targeted marginalized groups, sought to eliminate birthright citizenship, shut down funding in the sciences, and attempted to fire vast swaths of our civil service.
Early in February, CLF held a town hall meeting to discuss the path forward as we collectively navigate these developments. CLF Legal Fellow Dominique Agnew moderated the discussion with Brad Campbell, CLF president; Kate Sinding Daily, senior vice president for law and policy; and Britteny Jenkins, vice president for our environmental justice program.
Below, we’ve excerpted a few of their comments on the critical questions that environmental organizations now face. Their comments have been edited for clarity.
Dominique: Brad, we’re a few weeks into Trump’s second term. What’s top of your mind regarding impacts to CLF’s work?
BRAD: What’s been quite surprising is how draconian the assault has been on our environmental protection infrastructure and yet how politically clumsy Trump’s execution has been. The clearly unlawful pause he ordered on all federal funding spelled chaos for major climate and environmental funding programs and landed especially hard on our community partners, who were understandably panicked at the news. But that executive order had to be rescinded within a day because of the backlash and later court intervention. Tariffs against Mexico and Canada that were announced [on Saturday, February 1], which would have a devastating effect on the supply chains for many clean energy projects, were paused a few days later.
And none of the sweeping changes to federal agencies that are contemplated in Trump’s executive orders or are being undertaken by Elon Musk and his minions have been coordinated with Congress – not even with Trump and Musk’s staunchest Republican allies in Congress. Trump is working with a very thin margin. It’s one of the reasons why some of the initial moves were pulled back so quickly.
That said, the dismantling of core government functions is proceeding apace and may very well be affirmed in both Houses of Congress And it’s different in scale and degree from anything we’ve seen proposed or attempted before. It will be devastating even after we stop it in the courts or if it’s tempered by Congress.
CLF has always had to fill the gap and enforce the law when federal officials failed to do so. That gap has been widening at both the federal and state levels for decades, but now we expect there will be little or no good faith environmental law enforcement. The environmental cops we generally rely on won’t be on the beat or even at their desks. CLF will have to cover the whole field in holding polluters, state agencies, and especially federal officials accountable under the law. To fill the parallel policymaking gap, we will be asking our state leaders to show even bolder leadership in terms of moving forward on climate, accelerating the clean energy transition, and providing the protections that we historically have expected under federal law. It’s why we’ve increased our core lawyers at CLF by more than 50%.
Dominique: Britteny, how can we continue to fight for progress in the environmental justice movement against such headwinds?
BRITTENY: One of President Trump’s day-one orders withdrew President Clinton’s executive order on environmental justice, which was the first federal action of its kind. It had survived numerous administrations, including the first Trump administration. These attacks on environmental justice are very much reflective of a pervasive attack on civil rights in this country right now.
So, what can we do? First, we need to bolster our protections at the state and local level so we continue to see progress.
We have to keep front of mind how our work helps communities of color, low-income communities, communities with limited English proficiency, how they can benefit from that work, and also how we can be in partnership with them. In the environmental justice program, we will work to pass environmental justice laws across the region. We have successfully passed laws in Massachusetts and Vermont and strengthened laws in Connecticut. This legislative session, we are aiming to pass an environmental justice law in Rhode Island and energy justice legislation in Maine.
We will keep advocating for transportation justice. By that, I mean working to ensure that every community in New England, including Black and Brown communities, can access emission-free public transit. We will also fight to stop any rollbacks in progress at the state or federal levels.
If there are efforts to build landfills, incinerators, and other harmful infrastructure in communities already overburdened by polluting infrastructure, we will work to fight this. And if any of our community partners are unfairly targeted by anyone, we will plan on working with them to defend them against these attacks.
In fighting both for progress and fighting against these attacks, it’s clear to me that in the climate movement, environmental movement, and environmental justice movement, we need a bigger tent. We need to bring new voices along with us in this fight. We need new partners, and we need to deepen our current partnerships. This will be key to advancing this important work.
Dominique: Kate, how is CLF coordinating with the larger environmental community to counter the new administration?
KATE: There is a coordinated effort among all the major environmental groups that engage in litigation to ensure that we are coordinated in our efforts to respond to the administration. The goals are twofold. One is to ensure that we’re covering all the bases because we can see already that we’re falling victim to the shock and awe tactics that we knew were going to come with this administration. A critical part of getting through these next years is going to be not falling victim to hysteria by responding to absolutely everything that gets thrown out there and rather really being careful to determine what’s an actual threat.
The other piece is to avoid duplication and inefficiency. The first time around, there was an unnecessary degree to which multiple groups were responding. It was less strategic and also less efficient in terms of making sure that we had the resources to allocate across all the issues.
There are a surprisingly small number of environmental organizations in the country that litigate – National Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, and Center for Biological Diversity being the main national ones. Then, there are a number of regional ones, including CLF as the only one here in New England. So, we are now engaged in biweekly calls to coordinate around litigation.
I am optimistic that efforts to roll back may run out of steam when they meet the reality of businesses’ desire to protect their existing investments and the momentum to drive forward on progress, notwithstanding efforts to throw roadblocks up at a regulatory and potentially even legislative level.
Dominique: Any closing thoughts for those of us concerned about the environment and justice?
BRAD: To be sure, CLF will be challenged as never before, but CLF is ready, our supporters are rallying and growing, and we know we can continue to make progress despite the wrecking ball Trump and Musk are wildly swinging in Washington. They’re clearly better prepared than last time and taking more radical steps to eliminate fundamental protections of our health and environment. We won’t be able to stop all of the damage. But in a sense, their overreach may very well be their undoing. You can’t rule by fiat in this country, not yet. Trump’s overreaching will make many of his attempts to subvert long-standing health environmental protections easier to overturn in court, as was true in his last term.
Sign up for an email to learn more about what we’ll be doing in 2025.
