President Joe Biden promised ambitious policies to promote renewable energy and advance environmental justice. He also pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Biden promised to raise the staffing of the tiny environmental policy office, but it is still woefully understaffed.
The Nixon-era Council on Environmental Quality has the primary mission of overseeing the National Environmental Policy Act. This law, which was passed in 1969, requires federal agencies and federal agencies to reduce the environmental effects of projects such as the construction of federal buildings, new highways, and renewable energy projects on public lands.
CEQ’s staff largely operates out of the limelight, but a Recent staff list Organizational chart offer new insight into the agency’s inner workings and policy priorities during the Biden administration. The majority of staff are divided into teams that work in the areas of budget and administration, NEPA, conservation, climate and change, engagement, budget and administration. There’s also an office of the chief sustainability officer and the general counsel’s team.
The agency’s focus and its influence in the White House can change drastically depending on the administration and on who’s leading the agency.
“Each administration designs its policy offices to its own agenda and needs, and that tells you a lot about their priorities, about their management vision and about the potential effectiveness of what they’re trying to achieve,” said Jim Connaughton, who led CEQ during the George W. Bush administration.
Brenda Mallory, a veteran EPA lawyer who has expertise in everything, from pesticides to hazardous waste to oceans to wetlands, was chosen by Biden to lead his CEQ. Mallory, the first Black council chair, was also CEQ’s general counsel during the Obama administration.
She and her small staff were handed some of the Biden administration’s biggest environmental priorities, including overhauling Trump-era changes to NEPA and following through on Biden’s ambitious environmental justice promises. The Biden administration pledged to channel 40% of federal climate-related investments towards disadvantaged communities, and to track its progress using a new scorecard.
CEQ has already fallen short of several key goals. This includes the scorecard, due to be released two years ago, and climate and economic screening tool. These were released in draft form in February after a six-month delay.
Mallory’s team is made up of 55 employees, according to a staff list that was current on April 4. They include veterans of the Obama administration and think tanks, Capitol Hill office offices, and cities. The majority of them are detailees, meaning they’re basically on loan from other federal agencies.
Mallory and some of her aides have offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the West Wing; the bulk of CEQ’s staff works out of Jackson Place town homes on Lafayette Square.
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Climate and environmental justice advocates want to see the agency’s staff beefed up dramatically so CEQ can keep pace with what the White House calls “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by an administration.”
Concerns about CEQ’s staffing and morale were amplified earlier this year when its top environmental justice official left about a year after Biden’s inauguration.
“I got dangerously close to burnout,” CEQ’s former director for environmental justice, Cecilia Martinez, Telled The Washington PostJanuary
CEQ only had funding for 14 full-time employees during Biden’s first year in office, according to budget documents released by the White House.
E&E News was informed by an agency spokesperson that the agency now has 17 dedicated staffers. The agency’s most recent spending bill allowed it to increase its ranks to 22 full-time workers. Biden’s budget request for 2023 would keep that number at 22 (Greenwire, March 30,
“There’s no question in my mind that more staff will be incredibly helpful to CEQ in achieving their mission,” said David Kieve, who was CEQ’s public engagement director under Biden. The challenge for staff at CEQ and the climate policy office “is that they’re serving under a president who has made more robust commitments on climate than any president ever has.”
“Those commitments are appropriate and badly needed because our planet is melting and it’s melting rapidly. Everybody feels the pressure of the situation that we’re in and the need to act and act as quickly as we possibly can,” said Kieve, who left the Biden administration in January to serve as president of EDF Action, the advocacy arm of the Environmental Defense Fund.
CEQ hired Jessica Ennis (earthjustice director for over 30 years) to replace him last month.Greenwire, 28 March
Martinez told E&E News last week in an interview that she wants to see the new staff dedicated to CEQ’s environmental justice programs. “If those are for EJ positions, I think that’s excellent,” she said. “If not, they definitely need to build that in.” She also urged the Biden administration to keep hiring from outside of Washington in addition to veteran government officials.
“I would hate that we begin to see those people that are part of the Washington Beltway just kind of rotate positions around, because that doesn’t bring the energy and the innovation to what we need,” Martinez said. “I would hope that that’s a very cognizant part of how we build CEQ.”
The agency needs experience, Martinez said, but “you also need freshness.”
We are looking for climate and environmental justice experts
CEQ chief staff Matt Lee-Ashley stated in an interview that they plan to use their newly funded staff slots for the hiring of a senior director for resilience on climate team, and to hire additional staffers to support environment justice work.
“CEQ has been tasked with some responsibilities that are unprecedented,” Lee-Ashley said, including its new environmental justice portfolio and the implementation of the infrastructure law. That work comes on top of CEQ’s long-standing responsibilities under NEPA.
Martinez will be replaced by a senior director for environment justice at the agency. The agency plans to make an announcement about that soon.
Jane Flegal and Austin Brown, a senior director for transportation emission, were transferred to the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy under Gina McCarthy. They were spending most of the time with that office, but they still work with CEQ on climate changes, according to CEQ.
Some environmental justice advocates think CEQ needs a dramatic staff influx to be able to keep up with the administration’s promises.
“I made a recommendation at the beginning that they needed to double or triple the size of CEQ with a strong focus of having enough folks to authentically do the work around environmental justice,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, a former EPA environmental justice official who’s now at the National Wildlife Federation. “They’ve got to give the individuals the resources that they need as well and the power to be able to get this stuff done.”
Rachel Cleetus, policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said CEQ has been “underresourced and understaffed to date” despite its role “in delivering on the Justice40 initiative of the Biden administration.”
Peggy Shepard is the co-chairperson of a White House Council on Environmental Justice that Biden established. She lamented that CEQ has fewer full-time employees that her New York-based environmental justice organization.
“We have 23 people and are challenged to do what we need to do,” Shepard said. “CEQ has the tremendous responsibility of leading the work to operationalize environmental justice in the federal government with less staff than my organization.”
