When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
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Department of Commerce
• Supplemental Poverty Measure. The Census Bureau should review the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to consider whether it provides an accurate measure for use by the Council of Economic Advisers and others. The findings from this review should also be taken into consideration when constructing the Current Survey and other supplemental surveys, so that the SPM can be better tracked on a trend basis and support better policy decisions over time. This information would be particularly helpful in determining how to combat homelessness in conjunction with Department of Health and Human Services programs.
• Abolish the National Advisory Committee and reevaluate all other committees. The Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations (NAC) was established by the Obama Administration in 2012 and rechartered by the Biden Administration in 2022. The committee is a hotbed for left-wing activists intent upon injecting racial and social-justice theory into the governing philosophy of the Census Bureau. The NAC should immediately be abolished by the incoming Administration. The NAC charter gives the Secretary of Commerce the authority to terminate the committee. Since the Secretary of Commerce established the NAC in 2012 under the FACA, the Secretary is authorized to terminate the NAC. The new Administration should also reevaluate and potentially abolish all non-statutory standing committees within the Census Bureau, including the Census Scientific Advisory Committee.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION
The Economic Development Administration (EDA) is charged with investing in local communities to encourage and enable growth and innovation in the private sector, with particular focus on distressed or underserved areas. Over time, it has also served as a distribution mechanism for emergency relief funds (e.g., Hurricane Maria and COVID-19).
In the Trump Administration, the EDA served an important role for the CARES Act. It successfully disbursed approximately $1.5 billion in funding beginning in May 2020 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this task revealed EDA’s shortcomings. Ona capability level, EDA lacked the technical and financial systems and skills to disburse these funds in a compliant manner and required external contracts for advisory support to hire the personnel needed to accomplish its goals.
Historically, EDA was a small bureau with an annual budget for $350 million in Public Works grants annually. EDA’s decision-making is decentralized to its six regional offices, which delayed the release of CARES Act funding by months. But more broadly, EDA is an impediment to coordinated campaigns that advance