When President Donald Trump’s administration last week shut off the spigot of federal grant money, which a federal judge said is likely in violation of US law, it caused confusion and panic among groups and researchers that work on clean energy, climate change and environmental justice.
Nonprofits, small businesses and state and city agencies abruptly lost access to millions of dollars that were already under contract and being used. After the National Science Foundation (NSF) paused all its grants, researchers rushed to find out if their projects were affected, and some had their salaries frozen.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the spending pause days later. But uncertainty persists, and the full impact of the disruption, which was unprecedented, is still coming into view.
“It’s been very confusing,” says Alex Bomstein, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Air Council, which is headquartered in Philadelphia and has offices in Wilmington and Pittsburgh. The group has three Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants and says its access to this money was turned off, then back on, then again switched off over the course of the week. “We’ve gotten mixed messaging, and obviously it concerns our employees as well as the communities that we serve,” Bomstein says.
The Ridgeland, Mississippi-based nonprofit 2C Mississippi can’t access project funds from an EPA grant awarded last August, says Dominika Parry, the group’s founding president and CEO.
“It’s surreal. None of this makes sense,” she says. “I am overwhelmed trying to make decisions based on the information we have, and the information keeps changing.” By Monday night, Parry was hearing from peers that their funding was available again, although she was still locked out of her grant.
Parry isn’t sure if her group will need to furlough employees. An energy consulting firm in Spokane, Washington, called Zero Emissions Northwest already took that step, says its president David Funk, due to his inability to access grant money from the Department of Agriculture. Not only had he not gotten grant access back by Monday night, he received an email from the agency that day reiterating the funding pause, he says.
At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, at least one postdoctoral researcher whose work is funded by the NSF was “unable to access her salary,” according to environmental studies professor Laurence Smith.
The saga started Jan. 20 when Trump, who has denied and minimized climate change, signed an executive order directing a pause on climate funds in connection with two major laws passed under former President Joe Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. One week later, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a memo announcing a more sweeping, government-wide pause of all agency grants, loans and other financial assistance.
Even though an initial legal challenge prompted a federal judge in Washington to issue a temporary halt on the freeze — which led to the administration withdrawing the controversial OMB memo days later — grant funding for climate projects overwhelmingly stayed frozen. A second legal challenge prompted another judge in Rhode Island last Friday to temporarily block the freeze. Even after all that, the judge in Washington on Monday raised fresh concern that the reversal still isn’t being fully implemented by the administration.
“This is all a very deliberate agenda, and chaos is the strategy,” says Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. While her organization doesn’t get any federal funding, she spoke with many groups who rely on such funds. “It’s really troubling. It’s chilling, actually,” she says.
Bomstein’s group, like many others, had to delay work due to the freeze. But the negative impacts extend much further, he notes.
If the group keeps struggling to access federal funds, he says, it’s public health that ultimately will suffer. The Clean Air Council has programs to expand local air monitoring in Delaware and Pennsylvania; cutting them, he explains, would mean “people don’t get the data needed to evaluate health impacts, which means more people are going to get sick and die in these communities.” On Monday afternoon, the group was notified that its grant access had been restored.
2C Mississippi was awarded a nearly $20 million EPA grant just a few weeks ago but has not yet received an official award letter. That money is supposed to be invested in a new resilience hub in central Mississippi, Parry says, where many people need a place to evacuate to or access services such as drinking water and electricity during storms, heat waves and other disasters.
Even if and when the awarded grant money starts flowing again, “that’s not the end of this story,” says Zealan Hoover, who was a senior EPA official during the Biden administration. One of the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic is that having to stop and start projects is not only disruptive but can make the projects more expensive, he observes.
Asked whether it was making awarded grant money available to grantees and what guidance it was giving them, an EPA spokesperson responded, “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people. He advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country in his first term and will continue to do so this term.” The agency said questions about grantees’ financial portal access should be directed to the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The government’s actions have already had a chilling effect, especially in academia, and there’s widespread worry about what’s yet to come.
Trump’s order to end IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law expenditures, and another Day One order to terminate jobs, programs and grants relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental justice, loom over organizations and scientists, as does the possibility of future efforts to target climate-directed work.
Smith, of Brown University, says he has three new federally funded projects he would normally recruit graduate students to work on, “but I don’t know whether I should recruit them or not.”
On Sunday, the NSF said it would unfreeze payments. “The NSF Award Cash Management Service has been restored, and the system is available to accept payment requests as of 12:00 PM ET on February 2,” spokesperson Michelle Negron said on Tuesday.
Environmental researchers are still trying to figure out how to navigate grant-proposal language around climate change and DEI in light of the executive orders. Applications that previously would have benefitted from a focus on helping disadvantaged communities, environmental justice or inclusivity — seen as demonstrating broad impact — suddenly could be undermined by the same references.
Liza Roger, a marine biologist and geochemist at Arizona State University, is in the fortunate position of having secure funding right now. But she’s starting to consider whether she needs to look overseas in the future: “We just have no idea what they’re going to come up with next.”
Photo: The Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, DC. Photographer: Eric Lee/Bloomberg
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