Highlights from the Change Log: EPA Removes Information About its HBCU and Minority Serving Institutions Advisory Council
Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Highlights from the Change Log” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their significance, as well as understanding of the ephemeral nature of website information. These website changes happened in April 2025 and feature the removal of information about the EPA’s HBCU and Minority Serving Institutions Advisory Council.
What Happened?
In April 2025, the EPA removed information about its Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority Serving Institutions (HBCU-MSI) Advisory Council. The EPA deleted the webpage dedicated to this advisory council along with its entry from the landing page for all Federal Advisory Committees at EPA. The EPA’s Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education landing page deleted all information about working with HBCU-MSIs, including a paragraph and multiple links describing EPA’s activities with HBCU-MSIs and the HBCU-MSI Advisory Council. The pages that had been linked are no longer functional; all now return errors saying, “Sorry, but this web page does not exist.”
Why We Think it’s Interesting:
These changes came days after President Trump signed the executive order (EO), “Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” which calls for a White House HBCU Initiative led by an executive director designated by President Trump and encourages expanded private-sector engagement. It revoked Biden’s EO, “Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity Through Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” and terminated EPA’s HBCU-MSI Advisory Council.
Communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of environmental injustices, and scholarship coming out of HBCUs has been foundational to the environmental justice movement. HBCUs and MSIs are particularly well-positioned to provide counsel to the EPA for addressing environmental hazards, risks to public health and wellbeing, and environmental racism. EPA’s HBCU-MSI Advisory Council was established to provide the EPA with guidance to advance environmental justice, diversify the environmental workforce, and strengthen institutions’ quality and capacity to participate in and benefit from government resources. This approach was heavily informed by and centered around equity and environmental justice, a key priority of the Biden administration.
While President Trump’s executive order ostensibly supports HBCUs and MSIs, that is contradicted by the administration’s simultaneous attack on equity and justice frameworks. Revoking the Biden EO weakens the federal government’s engagement with HBCUs, and erasing information about the EPA’s HBCU-MSIs Advisory Council undermines HBCUs’ ability to contribute to agency work and policy around environmental justice and equity. Instead, President Trump’s new EO centers fiscal stability and reliance on the private sector, which opens the door to the White House exercising more control over HBCUs and MSIs.
More Details:
EPA’s page for the HBCU-MSI Advisory Council
EPA’s page for all federal advisory committees
EPA’s page about the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education (OPEEE)