Since the early days of the second Trump Administration, when the President signed a series of executive orders targeting tens of billions of dollars in grant funding awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden, there has been the expectation of a lawsuit (or many lawsuits) challenging those cancellations.
While a few more narrowly targeted lawsuits have since been filed, the big one is now here: last week a lawsuit was filed on behalf of 23 organizations, including nonprofits and both local and tribal governments from across the country, that had EPA grants canceled, and that seeks to become a class action suit all parties that lost funding due to the agency cutting some 350 previously awarded grants.
The suit seeks to reinstate all of the grants that were canceled by EPA following the rush of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump after he took office early this year.
The suit, filed by Southern Environmental Law Center, Earthjustice, Public Rights Project and Lawyers for Good Government, includes a number of legal arguments for why canceling the $3 billion in grants for illegal — but the central tenant is that the money was appropriated by Congress with a very specific framework for how it should be awarded, and that cannot be undone simply because the President disagrees with then programs.
“EPA’s termination of the program is unlawful,” the suit reads. “It violates bedrock separation-of-powers principles by effectively repealing a congressional enactment and impounding funds based on nothing more than the President’s disagreement with policies Congress duly enacted.”
“Environmental justice grants were created to address the real harm to public health in communities of color and low-wealth communities. The communities were promised transformative funding to address generations of injustice, and now that’s being taken away,” Kym Meyer, the Southern Environmental Law Center’s litigation director, said in a release. “This administration has shown no interest in learning the truth about how these grant funds are supporting essential and impactful work on the ground. Rathe,r they have arbitrarily and unlawfully terminated the grant programs with callous disregard for the impact of their actions — all to score political points.”
The suit details what seems like a very haphazard process inside EPA, which was directed by the President’s executive orders to cut federal funding for projects related to “equity” and “environmental justice” — but neither terms were in any way defined.
The EPA’s assistant deputy administrator Travis Voyles made the unilateral decision to cut the Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreements, Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants, Thriving Communities Grants, the Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Program, and the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers programs “in the course of a single day,” according to the suit. These Congressionally funded programs were axed “for policy reasons,” as Voyles wrote in an email quoted in the lawsuit.
The filing asks the court to “require EPA to reinstate all grant awards” for the entire class that had previously been canceled, have the agency pay for all legal fees, and award “other and further relief as the court may deem just and proper.”
