Politico

Jessica Hertz, the staff secretary in the White House, is leaving her position, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Hertz, a former lawyer in Facebook’s Washington office, occupied one of the most powerful perches in the White House, controlling the flow of paper and documents that reached President Joe Biden’s desk. She is one of the first senior White House staffers to leave the administration, which hasn’t hit its 10-month mark yet.

It’s unclear who will replace her and lead the eight-person staff secretary’s office.

Hertz, who also served as a deputy assistant to the president and will leave in the coming days, had no comment. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

Before joining the Biden transition team as general counsel in June 2020, Hertz was a director and associate general counsel for regulatory affairs at Facebook, where she spent more than two years. Hertz also worked as principal deputy counsel for Biden when he was vice president, before doing a stint at the law firm Jenner & Block. She started her career in politics in the Obama administration, as counselor to Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator Cass Sunstein, before joining the Justice Department.

Hertz, who was described by White House colleagues as easy to work with and very talented at her job, studied art history and French literature at Harvard and earned a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.

Previous staff secretaries at the White House have gone on to prominent political posts. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and former White House counsel Harriet Miers were staff secretaries during the George W. Bush administration; former White House communications director David Gergen served in the role during the Reagan administration; and former White House chief of staff John Podesta and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) both held the job during the Clinton administration. Rob Porter, who served in the role for President Donald Trump, resigned amid reports that he’d been abusive to his past wives.

Vaccine maker Moderna is resisting pressure from the White House to increase international donations of its Covid-19 shot in 2022, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The Biden administration has urged Moderna for months to increase its production domestically, in an attempt to help deliver on the president’s pledge to make the U.S. “an arsenal of vaccines” for the world. The White House has donated tens of millions of Moderna doses abroad. Its push for more comes despite the company’s agreement to supply 500 million doses to low- and middle-income countries, including 34 million doses this year, through the international vaccine aid program known as the COVAX Facility.

Moderna, which developed its shot with scientific and financial help from the government, has shied away making additional commitments, the two sources said. The company has cited worries about its ability to balance its domestic and international responsibilities.

But administration officials privately believe the reluctance is also driven in part by financial concerns: If Moderna agreed to sell the Biden administration doses for poorer countries it would likely be asked to do so at cost, one source said, putting pressure on its bottom line.

The company’s stance has infuriated top Biden health officials, who have pressed Moderna executives in recent meetings that one person characterized as “very intense.” The deliberations between the federal government and Moderna could undermine the Biden administration’s efforts to ship more doses overseas as it begins to roll out booster shots to Americans.

“We need them to step up to the plate in the short term and dramatically increase the number of doses they’re delivering to low and middle-income countries,” a senior administration official said.

The White House declined to comment on the record. Moderna has not yet responded to a request for comment on the allegations about its financial motivations.

But amid the ongoing tension, the company announced early Thursday that it will build a vaccine-production hub in Africa to produce up to 500 million doses each year. It has not chosen a site or set a timeline for opening the facility, however.

“While we are still working to increase capacity in our current network to deliver vaccines for the ongoing pandemic in 2022, we believe it is important to invest in the future,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.

The Biden administration’s strained talks with Moderna stand in stark contrast to its relationship with Pfizer and BioNTech. The partners turned down government aid to develop their Covid-19 shot but have worked with the administration to increase global vaccination. In September, the two companies signed a deal with the federal government to deliver 1 billion doses of their vaccine for international donation by the end of September 2022.

The White House announced in August that it would begin the process of doling out boosters to most adults within weeks, sparking criticism from top federal scientists and outside health experts. They argued that the U.S. should instead focus on increasing domestic primary series vaccinations and donations across the globe.

Since then, the Biden administration has tried to work with Moderna to find new ways to increase doses available for donation.

“This is something the administration has been trying to get Moderna to commit to for a long time,” one of the individuals with direct knowledge of the situation said. “It’s been difficult.”

Moderna said Thursday that its planned vaccine hub would cost as much as $500 million to build, and it could eventually produce shots for other diseases using the same mRNA technology that underlies its Covid-19 vaccine.

But outside experts estimate that constructing a facility from scratch, hiring and training staff could take years. And the move is unlikely to satisfy a White House that just weeks ago set a goal of ending the pandemic by next September.

“We want them to increase the doses that can go in the very short term,” the senior administration official said. The billions of taxpayer dollars poured into developing the vaccine have only deepened U.S. officials’ frustration with the company’s hesitation to further aid the president’s international efforts.

“The U.S. government co-invented the vaccine. We’ve spent over $8 billion,” the official said.

In the meantime, Moderna is also facing — and resisting — growing pressure from activists and international organizations to share the formula for its vaccine with manufacturers in other countries.

The Biden administration earlier this year formally backed waiving patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines to expand production worldwide. But that proposal is fiercely opposed by both drug manufacturers and some European countries.

The White House will announce Wednesday that the nation’s supply of at-home Covid-19 tests is on track to triple by early November, driven by recent government investments and the FDA’s emergency authorization of a test from ACON Laboratories.

The Biden administration projects that even more tests should be available by the end of the year. A White House official told POLITICO’s David Lim the administration is purchasing another $1 billion of at-home tests that will contribute to a quadrupling of the market to 200 million tests per month in December.

The new investment builds on $2 billion the administration is using to boost production of a number of different Covid-19 tests from manufacturers including Abbott, OraSure Technologies, Quidel and Intrivo. It comes after surging demand driven by the Delta variant strained the nation’s supply of rapid at-home tests. In recent weeks, many retail pharmacies have placed limits on the number customers can buy.

More testing sites: The administration is also working to double the number of pharmacies participating in the government’s free testing program — which is expected to surpass 10,000 stores in the coming weeks — to 20,000 locations.

The White House ultimately hopes to have 30,000 free testing sites running nationwide, including community-based testing locations.

Home testing woes: The White House announcement comes a day after FDA cautioned that certain lots of Ellume’s at-home test is prone to potential false positive results due to a manufacturing issue.

The issue affected about 427,000 of Ellume’s tests, out of the 3.5 million the company has shipped to the U.S. About 195,000 of the impacted tests have not been used, according to a spokesperson for the company.

What’s next: The administration argues the government’s investments will expand access to Covid-19 testing and drive down prices.

“There will not just be more tests on the market, but we expect much more affordable tests on the market,” the White House official said.

Joe Biden indicated late Tuesday he was warming to a Democratic proposal to blow up the rules of the Senate to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, amid fears that a breach would send the U.S. government into default and the whole economy into a tailspin.

The president told reporters that a filibuster carve out to solve the current stalemate with Republicans over the debt limit before the estimated Oct. 18 deadline was a “real possibility.” It was a remark that sources inside the administration said reflected the growing belief that the party may need to take drastic steps to prevent default. It also served as a signal to Senate Democrats that the president supports their own growing conviction that a change to the chamber’s rules may be needed to head off a financial crisis.

Should Senate Democrats go down the filibuster reform route, they would need all 50 senators and Vice President Kamala Harris (as a tie-breaking vote) to offer their support. That is hardly guaranteed given opposition to filibuster changes from some moderate members, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

But Biden’s remark suggested momentum for the act is increasing. It came as the president was returning from delivering his sales pitch for infrastructure and social spending plans in Michigan and as the White House increasingly tries to shame Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for the debt ceiling brinkmanship. On Wednesday, Biden is scheduled to join business leaders at an event on the matter.

“Any scenario is possible to fix the debt ceiling right now,” a person familiar with discussions among Democratic leadership told POLITICO. “Everything is on the table. Every option.”

Republicans have twice thwarted efforts to raise the debt ceiling to avoid an historic default, and are on the precipice of doing it again in the Senate on Wednesday, when another bill to raise it will be considered. After voting to raise or suspend the debt ceiling three times under former President Donald Trump, McConnell is refusing to provide Republican votes to solve the looming default in order to inflict political pain on Democrats.

Failure to address the debt limit, a step required by law that at various times has been treated as routine, would tank the country’s credit, raise interest rates and impact social security checks. But for months, McConnell has pressured Democrats to act on the debt limit on their own through the complex budget process known as reconciliation. It’s a step Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have long resisted because it would take up precious Senate floor time — but nonetheless is a filibuster-proof way around the issue.

While Democrats closely aligned with the Biden administration have urged them to use whatever avenues are available, White House officials had repeatedly said that Biden continued to oppose creating filibuster carve outs, also known as the “nuclear option,” to address the debt ceiling or other legislative deadlocks.

“The debt limit needs to be raised. The best would be to do it in a bipartisan manner, but if that’s not possible the Democrats should figure out whatever way works for them,” said Jason Furman, who served as a Council of Economic Advisers chairman for former President Barack Obama. “Economically, the outcome is the same whether it is the nuclear option, reconciliation or some other way.”

Biden’s softening on the issue could have vast implications on his broader agenda, provided he convinces Manchin and others to go along with him. There is a long backlog of liberal priorities that have run up against a Republican blockade — from gun control to immigration to voting rights. If Democrats create a filibuster carve out for the debt ceiling, it could embolden progressives to argue that exceptions should be made for other congressional matters as well.

“Maybe corporate lobbyists can urge Senator Manchin to change his mind on it, if the rest of us can’t,” said Faiz Shakir, a Democrat strategist who managed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, alluding to the pressure on lawmakers from the business world.

Yet, with less than two weeks to go before the debt ceiling is breached, operatives within the party are skeptical that senators will ultimately scrap the filibuster rules at this moment. Biden’s comments, however, have matched the sentiment among most Democratic senators to call Republicans’ bluff and force them into voting to suspend the debt limit, or take what a growing number of them view as the next logical step.

“The logic of McConnell’s argument is essentially telling Democratic senators to abolish the filibuster,” Shakir added.

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins was that rare Washington figure whose clout transcended presidential administrations and frequent power shifts in Congress — more so during a public health crisis.

Now, the Biden administration needs to find a Collins clone.

The search for a new leader for the world’s largest medical research agency, with a budget of more than $41 billion, creates another huge challenge while the White House plots the next phase of the pandemic response and struggles to find a nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

“We find ourselves in a deficit now: We have the largest health agency in the world, the NIH, without a leader and FDA at the same time,” said Ellen Sigal, who has chaired the Public–Private Partnerships Committee of the Foundation for the NIH. “These positions are problematic, particularly when we’re in the middle of finishing a pandemic.”

Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, Collins’ longtime No. 2, is most likely to serve as acting director in the interim. But he is unlikely to be Biden’s pick for a permanent leader, according to two people familiar with the early discussions. Collins told Bloomberg Law on Tuesday that he wanted to see a woman succeed him.

Any nominee, if confirmed by the Senate, will need to deftly navigate such priorities as overseeing dozens of trials for coronavirus treatments and vaccines while defending and explaining the administration’s pandemic response to the public and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The next director will also have to deal with GOP-stoked accusations that NIH funded risky “gain-of-function” virus research, linked to the unproven theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Collins’ successor will also have to shepherd a multibillion-dollar priority of President Joe Biden’s: the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new institute within the NIH that still needs congressional backing.

Biden originally envisioned the so-called ARPA-H as a $6.5 billion research initiative to tackle major health care challenges like Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and cancer. But lawmakers have already slashed its proposed budget by more than half, with the outcome now tied to the fragile congressional budget process.

The 71-year-old Collins managed to navigate such turbulence with a plainspoken, at times cheerful ease. He frequently showed up to hearings on the pandemic response toting a giant replica of the coronavirus and avoided the brickbats directed at other top Biden health officials like infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci.

“Francis is a gifted communicator,” said Kathy Hudson, a former NIH official who’s remained close to Collins. ”When he became NIH director, the research community lamented that that there were no NIH champions on the hill. Francis cultivated them by the dozens with leaders in both parties becoming unflagging advocates for NIH.”

Collins had been considering his departure for months, Fauci told POLITICO in an interview. Collins visited his longtime friend and colleague — who he has worked with since becoming director of the National Human Genome Research Institute in 1993 — in Fauci’s Bethesda, Md., office this winter and said he felt it was his time to leave.

“I literally pleaded with him not to do that,” Fauci recounted. It was during a Covid-19 case surge and the final months of the Trump presidency. “I said… ‘You’ve got to stick it out.’ He did. To his credit, he felt he owed it to the institution to make sure that there was stability.”

But Collins did tell Biden that he would not stay for the next four years.

Now that he has announced his intent to step down “by the end of the year,” the White House says it expects to select his replacement before he leaves.

“In the meantime, the American people can rest assured that there is a strong leadership across NIH and the department management — managing the Covid-19 pandemic and more,” White House principal deputy press decretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday.

The high-profile opening has the potential to cause headaches for the Biden administration, which continues to struggle with messaging on the pandemic as it choreographs the rollout of vaccine boosters.

However, Ann Cashion, who spent eight years at the National Institute of Nursing Research within NIH — including as its acting director— said that Biden “has the correct administrative advisors in place so that it will be handled without many headaches.”

“It is always difficult to find the right person with the right qualities to lead NIH,” she wrote in an email, adding the administration “has been acutely aware of the need for good science.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in an email to staff Tuesday that “it is an understatement to say [Collins] will be sorely missed,” adding, “few people could come anywhere close to achieving in a lifetime what Dr. Collins has during his tenure at NIH.”

But others stress the timing could be right to bring in a leader that can reenergize the sweeping, 27-institute science agency and lay the groundwork for ARPA-H, whose establishment was intended to disrupt the sometimes slow-moving culture created by more than two-dozen other research centers.

Ezekiel Emanuel, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist who spent 12 years at NIH, told POLITICO that Collins’ departure provides the opportunity for there to be a “rethink of the agency,“ whose efforts can be too fragmented and lead to gaps or inefficiencies in research.

He adds that there are too few grants awarded to Black researchers, and the average age of grant recipients has been increasing.

“That’s not a good thing for innovation,” Emanuel said.

Some advocates for ARPA-H have long been wary of Collins, especially because of his early reticence about the new agency.

“This is a seismic change in the government, so there naturally will be a ripple effect,” said Liz Feld, President of the Suzanne Wright Foundation, which had advocated for an ARPA-H model for years. But the change could “open up other opportunities and ways of doing things, and a fresh approach to things we can address in the health space.”

The only risk, Feld and others said, is if ARPA-H lost momentum because Collins, well-liked by lawmakers duking out budget priorities right now, left during the debate.

Collins will continue to work at his lab on the NIH campus, returning to his roots as a longtime geneticist. People close to him say he is happy to spend more time on science along with his other pursuits — including a rock band, the Affordable Rock ‘N Roll Act, which performs at NIH events to raise money for the agency.

“He’s really a Renaissance man in all ways,” said Association of American Medical Colleges President David Skorton, who has rehearsed with the band.

Fauci, who has become one of the most recognizable faces of the coronavirus response, told POLITICO he would “absolutely not” be NIH director and that his priorities lie with the infectious disease institute he heads, where trials for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments are ongoing.

“As much as I’ll miss Francis as a director, he’ll still be around in his lab,” he said. “He’s a very close colleague and a very good friend. You know, we’ve been through a lot of things together.”

A top Treasury Department official warned Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday that millions of dollars in federal aid may be in jeopardy because of two mask-shirking education programs in his state.

The department’s notice marks a new front in the Biden administration’s attempts to clamp down on Republican governors who have resisted public health guidelines for schools, now that more than 700,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic took hold last year.

“We are concerned that two recently created Arizona grant programs undermine evidence-based efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Adewale Adeyemo wrote in a letter to Ducey obtained by POLITICO.

Key context: In August, Ducey launched a $163 million federally-funded grant program for schools that stay open during the pandemic. But there was a catch. According to the governor’s office, money for qualifying schools was contingent on their compliance with a state law that outlaws mask mandates and vaccine requirements.

Ducey also launched a $10 million program that low-income families in the state could use to pay for private school tuition, online tutoring or child care. There were strings attached to that program, too. Ducey’s office said qualifying families needed to show their current school was quarantining students or “subjecting them to physical Covid-19 constraints” — including requiring masks or “providing preferential treatment to vaccinated students.”

“Safety recommendations are welcomed and encouraged — mandates that place more stress on students and families aren’t,” Ducey said at the time. “These grants acknowledge efforts by schools and educators that are following state laws and keeping their classroom doors open for Arizona’s students.”

Ducey response: CJ Karamargin, a spokesperson for the governor, said Ducey’s administration was reviewing the letter and would respond.

“Following the challenges during the 2020 school year, everyone’s primary focus should be equipping families with the resources to get their kids caught up,” Karamargin said in an email. “That’s exactly what this program does — giving families in need the opportunity to access educational resources like tutoring, child care, transportation and more. It’s baffling anyone would disagree with this approach.”

Looking ahead: Arizona’s laws prohibiting mask and vaccine mandates are facing a high-profile court challenge. But the Treasury Department said the programs still aren’t allowed to tap federal aid.

“A program or service that imposes conditions on participation or acceptance of the service that would undermine efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19 or discourage compliance with evidence-based solutions for stopping the spread of Covid-19 is not a permissible use of [federal] funds,” Adeyemo wrote.

Ducey’s office now has 30 days to lay out how the state will “remediate the issues,” according to the letter, or face potential sanctions that include a loss of funding.

Members of the environmental justice movement sent an email blast more than 5,600 times over a 48-hour period to top Biden administration officials, disrupting White House communication and sparking a tense exchange between the administration’s chief environmental outreach official and one of the key leaders of the movement.

The form-letter blast effectively shut down email communication over two August days between high-ranking Biden administration officials, including national climate adviser Gina McCarthy, her deputy Ali Zaidi, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and David Kieve, who leads outreach to environmental groups for the White House, according to Erika Thi Patterson, campaign director with the Action Center on Race and the Economy, and two others familiar with the incident.

Patterson said she learned those details when Kieve called her to express dismay in a 17-minute conversation that she characterized as aggressive and offensive.

“It’s really outrageous,” Patterson said of the Aug. 19 call with Kieve. “With all the crises our communities are facing right now, that all this energy and aggression was focused on receiving emails.”

The contretemps over the email blast, outlined here for the first time, symbolizes the administration’s challenges in satisfying the left-wing, mostly non-white movement calling for significant clean energy, public transportation, environmental cleanup and workforce investments in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

Kieve declined to respond to questions about the email campaign. But a White House official said that in an attempt to smooth the waters, the Biden team invited members of the Stop the Money Pipeline, the coalition of groups that sent the email blast, to meet with senior members of the White House Council on Environmental Quality to “share any concerns that they had about interactions surrounding this mass email campaign.”

The coalition declined the offer, the White House official said, because the groups were already in close communication with administration officials.

Nonetheless, many leaders of the movement told POLITICO that bitterness remains, as they worry the White House is doing too little to advance their agenda amid the tense negotiations transpiring in Congress.

“The administration wants the benefit of the doubt,” said Patterson, whose group is comprised of grass-roots activists, many of whom are people of color. “The reality is they haven’t earned it yet.”

Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, a Native American group which is also part of the Stop the Money Pipeline, added: “They are taking for granted the tens of thousands of people who are part of this climate movement and the countless frontline communities that are in danger. It’s going to come back to bite them in the butt if they don’t step up. It’s a matter of politics.”

A crucial moment

The increasing turbulence comes at a critical time for keeping the president’s progressive environmental base behind his domestic agenda, according to interviews with 16 people across the Biden administration, lawmakers, environmental groups and members of a White House council to address environmental justice.

At issue is whether the Biden administration will make good on its promises to reduce environmental pollution and invest in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Environmental justice veterans commended Biden’s unprecedented pledges to address those concerns, but criticized the lack of tangible results nine months into his presidency.

“In some instances there seems to be a dichotomy between what the administration says they’re committed to and what’s happening on the ground,” said Peggy Shepard, who co-chairs the Biden-created White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and is executive director of Harlem-based WE ACT for Environmental Justice. “I think the only way that these tensions can be tempered is when the talk is aligned with the walk.”

Some environmental justice leaders told POLITICO that some Biden policy positions jeopardize their communities’ health.

They attacked his support for carbon capture and storage technology, which is designed to catch emissions from burning fossil fuels before they enter the atmosphere but helps perpetuate the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas. They opposed new leases the administration approved for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They chastised the White House for failing to cancel Trump-era permits for the Line 3 oil sands pipeline running from Canada through Minnesota, a project that has galvanized Indigenous and progressive activists.

“Line 3 is an embarrassment,” said Maria Lopez-Nunez, a member of the White House council who is deputy director of organizing and advocacy for the Newark, N.J.-based Ironbound Community Corporation. “You can probably win a ton of friends by doing the things that are good for human health.”

The coming weeks will reveal how adept the White House is in managing a burgeoning, disparate grassroots environmental movement that differs in strategy, breadth, makeup and desires than traditional Big Green groups rooted in Washington, D.C.

“I do understand the frustration when communities have some hard things that are happening in their community and want things to change,” said White House aide Cecilia Martinez, speaking for the administration. “I want the same thing. That’s why I’m here — to make sure to try to figure out how to make those decisions in the best way possible.”

A growing breach

Activists in the Stop The Money Pipeline coalition of environmental, financial and progressive groups sent the email blast to White House and Treasury Department officials because they felt the Biden administration was ignoring their recommendations for an executive order designed to protect the financial system against climate change-related disruptions. Those groups want the executive order to create regulatory guidelines that would pressure banks and other financial institutions to stop financing fossil fuel projects like Line 3.

Biden has so far declined to make such an order, but he and his administration have framed their climate and environmental approach in environmental justice terms. Administration officials and their allies describe the outreach and financial pledges to environmental justice groups and the communities they represent as unparalleled.

Biden signed an executive order his first week in office to ensure 40 percent of federal benefits flow to communities dealing with disproportionate health, environmental, climate and economic burdens, an effort known as Justice40. His campaign held frequent regional dialogues with local groups. He turned the Council on Environmental Quality, often an afterthought in administrations, into a power center staffed with environmental justice experts. His Office of Management and Budget and McCarthy’s staff is exploring how to wrest greater environmental justice benefits from existing programs across all agencies.

“We can put Americans to work strengthening public lands and waters, and making our communities — rural and urban — more resilient against extreme weather,” Biden said in a July speech promoting his and Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget plan. “And we can take on the long-overdue work of advancing environmental justice by addressing pollution.”

But while Biden has taken swifter, broader measures to curb climate change and environmental pollution than any other president, environmental justice organizers remain guarded. Biden still must overcome decades of politicians making sweeping promises to hard-up communities.

Some early Biden hires and steps pleased activists. He established the White House environmental justice council. He eased access to key personnel, noted IEN’s Goldtooth. Biden’s domestic climate and environment agenda — much of which requires congressional approval — would through Justice40 and invest billions of dollars in neglected neighborhoods. Relations with the administration are “cordial,” even for skeptical groups, said Jackie Fielder, a spokesperson with Stop the Money Pipeline whom Kieve had contacted urging her to halt the email blast.

Martinez, whose title is senior director for environmental justice at the Council on Environmental Quality, said she personally reaches out to local groups for their perspective and hears “appreciation” for the White House’s efforts.

“We have to try to make sure everyone gets a chance to be heard and that we are authentic in addressing their concerns, even though we may not always agree about the solutions,” she said, adding, on Kieve, “David’s been a friend and partner to me, and to community leaders we’ve met along the way. He – and all of us – are committed to the work required in making sure that we center everything we do around addressing inequality and advancing environmental justice.”

Martinez noted that the White House has asked each federal agency to develop community engagement plans to reach environmental-justice groups, understand their issues and mold programs to better address those matters.

“There’s hundreds of [environmental justice] groups and organizations across the country,” Martinez said. “Listening to a small set of groups isn’t going to get us at the whole of the problem of what’s happening in this country, and so we do need to develop broader methods for listening in a truly democratic way.”

But groups say that consultation and rhetorical support only go so far.

Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, serves on the White House council. There’s “so many meetings that I can’t keep up,” she said. Accessibility isn’t an issue. But whether the process translates into results isn’t clear, said Wright.

“It’s certainly not moving as fast as we would like it to move,” Wright said of the Biden administration’s environmental justice efforts. “They’re very open to communication and suggestions. But the proof is in the pudding.”

Battle over fossil-fuel supports

The funds included in Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package excite Wright. She and others said those dollars would help ameliorate environmental harms in her community. Wright said the Biden administration also agreed to pilot programs on clean energy workforce training in disadvantaged areas. Those are promising developments.

But then Biden’s administration also pushed forward with Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leasing. That disheartened the New Orleans resident, who endured yet another devastating hurricane in early September that scientists believe was intensified by climate change, which is propelled mostly by fossil fuel emissions.

That’s the frustrating thing for community leaders: Biden deserves credit for making environmental justice central to his platform in a way no other president has, but his administration’s actions sometimes contradict those goals, said Sacoby Wilson, associate professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland.

“One problem with the current administration is on one hand they say they want to transition to a clean energy economy and on the other they are supporting gas infrastructure,” Wilson said. “That’s a problem. That’s a failure.”

It also speaks to the balancing act of sorting through discrete, local environmental matters while crafting national policy. The Biden administration has backed historic funding to mitigate health threats, promote investment and spark jobs in long-overlooked communities even as it continues backing carbon capture projects favored by energy-sector and trade unions.

But those environmental-justice initiatives are under threat as some moderate Democrats rail against the party’s $3.5 trillion spending plan, which includes $30 billion for lead water pipe replacements, $27.5 billion for green banks and billions for workforce training, clean energy tax credits and other policies. The Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative would play a significant role in steering those dollars.

Activists call it a put-up-or-shut-up moment for the Biden administration.

The reconciliation package includes “more funding than has ever been seen before” for environmental justice, said Mustafa Santiago Ali, who ran EPA’s environmental justice office during the Obama administration. But even Ali, who admitted to having “more access than probably a lot of folks,” said he is “really not sure” of the administration’s follow-through on the issue.

“At the end of the day a lot of this stuff is political decisions,” said Ali, who is now vice president of environmental justice, climate and community revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation. “We’re going to see the realness of all this over the next six months.”

Anxiety over Congress

On Capitol Hill, there is fear that some important environmental justice initiatives could get lost in the legislative shuffle.

House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) told POLITICO that Biden has “centered” environmental justice “more than any other president.” His conversations with administration personnel imbue confidence that they prioritize environmental justice.

Yet Grijalva also acknowledged Biden must expend more political capital to pass key legislative changes, such as ensuring regulators weigh the cumulative environmental and climate effect before permitting new projects and allowing individuals to claim civil rights abuses in environmental lawsuits.

Grijalva also said the administration must play defense on Democrats’ $3.5 reconciliation plan to stay true to those communities. Grijalva would know. He consulted hundreds of groups in a years-long effort to draft sweeping environmental justice legislation; Biden wrapped parts of it into his platform.

“We don’t know what the administration in their negotiations with the Senate is agreeing or disagreeing with,” Grijalva said. “We’re playing in the Senate’s backyard right now in which one senator with an inordinate amount of power is able to clip those efforts. That’s where we’re hoping the Biden administration and the White House hold the line.”