Every single environmental justice grant made by the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden Administration could be cancelled if the agency’s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, has his way.
According to an April court filing reported on by the Washington Post, the agency has plans to scrap what has been reported as nearly 800 grants, including every single one that’s focused on environmental justice — though there is some discrepancy over the numbers.
Previously, about 400 grants made through the Inflation Reduction Act totaling $20 billion, had been at the center of the controversy around canceling environmental justice funding granted during the Biden Administration.
Legal Battles Escalate as Groups Fight for Funds
This most recent court filing suggests an even broader attack on Biden-era funding, but Ryan Hathaway, the director for climate and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, which has been working with many organizations with EPA funding at risk, says that the number has been inflated.
Some of the grants had not only been awarded, but the money had been paid out too. However, “most money has not been paid out because the IRA grants were much bigger,” Hathaway says. “However, there are lots of grants by volume that are pretty far along in their work.”
But all those billions of dollars spent on climate justice aren’t going to simply evaporate — filing was made in a court case over the EPA blocking access to grant funds, and there are many similar cases underway already, with surely more to come too.
According to the court filing, “EPA leadership conducted an individualized, grant-by-grant review to determine which grants should continue, which should be modified, and which should be terminated based on alignment with Administration priorities or the purposes for which the Federal award was made.”
EPA Is Understaffed and Uncoordinated
While that is the official word from the agency, it appears that in many instances those reviews did not occur. Some organizations haven’t even been alerted that their funding is subject to being cancelled. “We still have some,” who haven’t been notified, Hathaway says, “but we anticipate that EPA is just so understaffed and uncoordinated that they are struggling to meet their own deadlines.”
“These are illegal terminations,” Sacoby Wilson of the University of Maryland, whose environmental justice lab lost its EPA funding in February, told Inside Climate News. The reasoning — that the programs no longer aligned with agency priorities — reveals a “fundamental misunderstanding” of their purpose, Wilson said.
EPA initiatives, built on decades of research, address the disproportionate pollution burden shouldered by Black and Brown communities. The Trump administration cut these programs under the “guise of fairness,” Wilson said. But these initiatives “are really at the core of helping the EPA to fulfill its mission to protect the environment and public health.”
The case that the court filing is from began after the Rhode Island-based Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council sued the EPA and a number of other federal agencies after funds from a $1 million-grant it received from the Forest Service became inaccessible back in January. The judge handling the case, a Trump appointee, said that the funds must be available to the council while the suit proceeds, writing that the organization showed that blocking its access to the money was “arbitrary and capricious.”
