The Trump Administration has canceled or frozen more than $29 billion in community environmental and renewable energy grants awarded under the Biden Administration, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the National Resource Defense Council.
The NRDC produced an interactive map titled “Stolen Futures” showing the locations, values, descriptions and status of 910 grants and sub-grants under 12 programs funded by Biden’s marquee Inflation Reduction Act. Trump directed federal agencies to begin rescinding many of Biden’s grant programs within hours of taking the office this year, calling them a waste of taxpayer money.
Some of those programs, administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, include the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund, $7 billion Solar for All Program, $6 billion Clean Communities Accelerator and the $3 billion Climate Justice Block Grant Program.
“The core climate and environmental justice grants as we know them are either gone or on their way out,” said Ella Mendonsa, a senior manager with the NRDC. “This is just a subsection of what we know was going to be hitting communities in particular.”
For its analysis, the NRDC selected 12 EPA grant programs that were meant to support community-level work, in line with Biden’s 2021 “Justice40” pledge that 40 percent of certain federal investments would flow directly “to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
Of $37 billion slated for disbursement through these programs, $159 million has been awarded while $9 billion has been canceled, the analysis found. Another $20 billion remains frozen—held up in legal limbo amid attempted cancellations.
“A lot of these grants were for small community-based organizations who, for the first time, decided to apply for federal funding,” Mendonsa said. “For a lot of communities this was the biggest, most transformative grant they could have.”
Also on Tuesday, another coalition of groups appealed a judge’s dismissal of their lawsuit challenging the termination of the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program, which aimed to fund natural disaster preparedness, expand workforce development opportunities, improve and monitor air quality, mitigate flood damage and combat high energy costs.
“The actions of this current administration have deferred dreams, put plans on pause, bragged about broken promises and illegally ignored the shared visions of what could be the reality of restoration and resilience,” Jalonne White-Newsome, former White House chief environmental justice officer, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Funds continue to flow through two of the programs considered in the NRDC analysis, the $5 billion Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program and the $3 billion Clean Ports Program, which are available to government entities and port authorities but not community organizations. They were included in the analysis for their potential to benefit fenceline communities.
All of the grant programs were funded when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Applications opened for most of the programs in 2023 and many organizations spent a year formulating project proposals. Grants were awarded and money began to flow in late 2024.
But Trump ordered the rescission of many EPA programs upon taking office in January, along with cuts to other grant programs administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In March, Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has enthusiastically carried out the president’s agenda, shuttered his agency’s environmental justice arm.
“For too long, politicians and bureaucrats have been fleecing the public purse under the guise of ‘environmental justice’—a favorite leftist buzzword,” Zeldin wrote in an April op-ed. “Instead of directly fixing actual environmental problems with our precious taxpayer dollars, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency lit them on fire to fund cronies and activist groups.”
For Cheryl Johnson, a second-generation community leader in Chicago, the environmental justice grants had been decades in the making. She leads an organization called People for Community Recovery that was founded by her mother in 1979 to address legacy pollution causing high cancer rates at housing projects in the remains of Chicago’s industrial Far South Side.
Her mother, Hazel Johnson, received an environmental award from President George H.W. Bush in 1992, and in 1994 stood in the White House as President Bill Clinton signed an order directing the EPA to develop an environmental justice strategy.
Hazel didn’t live to see the launch of Justice40 grants in 2021. But to Cheryl, it seemed like the government was finally recognizing their struggle.
“Never had I seen any opportunity giving grants to communities like mine, the opportunity to go after federal grants with that amount of resources to revitalize our communities,” she said at the press conference Tuesday.
Her organization was part of a coalition that received $2.8 million under the Community Change Grants program in financial support for local organizations. It would have enabled People for Community Recovery to hire staff and fund an initiative to save a historic schoolhouse from demolition and turn it into a community center instead.
But the grant was canceled this year after just $32,000 were disbursed.
“To see that just wiped away, it was devastating,” Johnson said.
In terminating all of the environmental justice grant programs, Zeldin was implementing one of the executive orders President Donald Trump issued on his first day in the White House in January, in which he called environmental justice programs a “radical and wasteful” form of reverse discrimination and racial preferencing, lumped together with “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
But in a recent interview with Inside Climate News, Charles Lee, who retired earlier this year after 26 years as a senior environmental justice official at the EPA, said Trump’s grant cancellations were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of environmental justice.
“Environmental justice is about protecting everyone,” Lee said. “And it’s a recognition that certain groups are not as well protected for a number of reasons, and they’re suffering greater environmental and public health harms. It’s not a special program for anybody. It’s to make sure everyone gets protected.”
Washington Bureau Chief Marainne Lavelle contributed to this article.
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Dylan Baddour
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Dylan Baddour covers the energy sector and environmental justice in Texas. Born in Houston, he’s worked the business desk at the Houston Chronicle, covered the U.S.-Mexico border for international outlets and reported for several years from Colombia for media like The Washington Post, BBC News and The Atlantic. He also spent two years investigating armed groups in Latin America for the global security department at Facebook before returning to Texas journalism. Baddour holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has lived in Argentina, Kazakhstan and Colombia and speaks fluent Spanish.
