Mustafa Ali

Mustafa Ali — who helped found the office in 1992 under George H. W. Bush — resigned as the head of the environmental justice program in a letter dated March 7, 2017.

The justice program was created to ensure all people had equal access to a clean and healthy environment, regardless of race, national origin, or income. However, a recent budget proposal from the Trump administration would cut the EPA’s funding by a quarter overall and get rid of the justice program altogether.

“I never saw in the past a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on … I can’t be a part of anything that would hurt those [disadvantaged] communities. I just couldn’t sign off on those types of things,” the Washington Post quoted Ali as saying.

But before he left, Ali penned a letter to the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, imploring Pruitt to think before slashing funds. The full text of Ali’s letter was tweeted by Emily Atkin, a staff […]