(AP) — When President Joe Biden made environmental protection a key element of his campaign, one of his promises was to overhaul a small federal office.
It’s the part of the Environmental Protection Agency that investigates when people in minority communities believe they have been unfairly harmed by industrial pollution or waste disposal.
The EPA’s civil rights office has received hundreds of such complaints since the mid-1990s but has only once made a formal finding of discrimination.
The situation has provoked criticism from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the EPA’s own Office of Inspector General and citizens who have filed complaints that sometimes languished for years — or decades.