Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed an executive order Thursday restoring an Environmental Justice map that had briefly gone defunct due to changes within the federal government.
According to Maryland Matters, the state first revealed its Environmental Justice Screening tool in 2022. The map, which originally relied on federal data, allowed users to track pollution and health burdens across Maryland’s census tracts. When President Trump took office earlier this year, one of his first executive orders directed all federal agencies to cease any activity related to environmental justice. As a result, the data the Environmental Justice Screening tool relied on was no longer available.
“Since the new Trump-Vance administration took office, we haven’t been able to rely on federal data because that data is not being released, and that data is not now readily available,” Moore said at the event signing the bill. “But in this administration, that won’t be enough to make us give up.”…