Removing lead paint and pipes. Cleaning up contaminated land. Monitoring pollution. Making houses more energy efficient. Installing solar panels in low-income neighborhoods. Those are some of the projects across the country that were cut off from federal funding when the Trump administration paused spending approved earlier by Congress.
The sweeping move is part of President Trump's plan to roll back environmental and climate change initiatives that started under former President Biden.
Federal judges intervened, issuing temporary restraining orders that prohibited the Trump administration from carrying out the funding freeze. But grant recipients, contractors and activists say promised government money has been held back even after the courts stepped in, throwing into doubt the government's standing as a reliable partner in protecting human health and the environment.
"Undermining the trust in the federal government may actually be the real point of this," says Zara Ahmed, vice president of policy and advisory operations at Carbon Direct, which helps companies, governments and other organizations cut their carbon emissions.
"Fast forward to the future, and imagine that you were trying to build a new project, and you were thinking about getting an award from the federal government. How would you think about that now?" Ahmed says. "I think people are going to be a lot more reluctant to do business with the federal government for fear of making investments, uprooting their lives, only to have the rug pulled out from under them."
'We wouldn't be able to move forward without it'
Trump has vowed to shrink the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending. One focus is initiatives to cut climate pollution and protect communities from the impacts of rising temperatures, like more extreme storms and heat waves. A Trump administration official did not respond to a request for comment.
The funding freeze is being felt across the U.S.
A Missouri school district couldn't pay for almost two dozen electric school buses it ordered to replace a fleet of diesel buses. In Springfield, Mass., officials didn't know if the city would get money it was promised to weatherize homes, remove lead paint and repair roads. Oklahoma regulators warned $100 million in grant funding to plug abandoned oil and gas wells was in jeopardy. A North Carolina official said the state risks losing out on more than $100 million in conservation projects that could protect communities from floods and wildfires. And in Kersey, Colo., officials had to hope the government would unfreeze money to remove an old grain elevator covered in asbestos, a cancer-causing substance that's linked to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year.
"We wouldn't be able to move forward without it," Susie Thielbert, a grant analyst for Kersey, told Colorado Public Radio about the grain-elevator project. "We are a very small community."
Without federal support, American communities — especially those in low-income areas that investors often avoid — will struggle to deal with a challenge as pervasive as climate change, market analysts and environmental advocates say.
"You can try to ignore climate realities, but we're feeling them," says Alys Campaigne, climate initiative leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center. "So to back out of any kind of leadership role and to defund programs that were specifically designed to address these needs just shifts the risk and the cost back onto communities and individuals."
Court fights deepen anxiety about climate action and U.S. governance
The fight over climate funding looks far from over.
On the day Trump took office, he signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to pause grant payments under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Those laws authorize huge federal investments aimed at protecting the environment and spurring investment in clean energy and new infrastructure.
Days later, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo directing agencies to temporarily halt funding related to "the green new deal," as well as diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and foreign aid. OMB said such investments are "a waste of taxpayer dollars." (There is no 'Green New Deal' within the government.)
Nonprofits and attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia filed separate lawsuits in federal court challenging the administration's actions. In both cases, judges issued temporary orders directing the Trump administration to halt its funding freeze.
The government's handling of the issue since then has only deepened anxiety among groups that were awarded grant funding. OMB rescinded its memo, and lawyers for the government said in a court filing that agencies were told to release funds that had been held back. However, in a message posted on the social media site X, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the administration had not canceled the funding freeze itself.
"The President's [executive orders] on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented," Leavitt wrote.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell, Jr. said the Trump administration has continued to improperly freeze some federal funding. McConnell ordered the administration to immediately restore funds it withheld, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, saying the freeze is "likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country."
Advocates say federal government has a crucial role funding environmental projects
One group that's been waiting on funding is Collaborative Earth. The organization is helping Native American tribes in Oklahoma develop more sustainable grazing practices and small farmers in the southeast reforest waterways to prevent flooding and store carbon pollution.
"It's strange that the payment of an invoice could make you wonder about the future of a democracy, but that's exactly what it feels like," says Aaron Hirsh, organization lead at Collaborative Earth.
Unless payments restart, Hirsh says his group is weeks away from having to lay people off — and potentially having to shut down entirely.
"I don't know when we're going to get started again on finding these kinds of solutions that can benefit local communities as well as ecosystems," Hirsh says. "This is the sort of funding that can support that kind of innovation. That's what it was supposed to do. And without it, I don't think we find those solutions."
Like a lot of organizations, Collaborative Earth doesn't receive grant funding in big upfront payments. Instead, it's compensated by the government for past expenses, like paying workers and buying equipment. In other cases, organizations can withdraw federal funding to cover about a week's worth of expenses. Unless groups have large cash reserves, even a brief interruption in government funding can cause problems.
"When these projects get frozen and you let all that staff go, you lose momentum, and you might lose the project permanently, because the people can't afford to sit and wait," says Campaigne of the Southern Environmental Law Center. "You're between a rock and a hard place of trying to stay committed to the work that you are dedicated to and feeding your family."
Funding uncertainty threatens to derail projects
The outlook isn't much better for groups whose funding has been restored.
"There's a lot of uncertainty," says Debra Hernandez, who runs an environmental nonprofit in South Carolina, "about whether folks should continue work."
Hernandez's group, the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association, gets federal funding, mainly through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to collect environmental data for the public, including information for hurricane models. When OMB froze funding, Hernandez says her group was temporarily locked out of government accounts it uses to withdraw grant money.
"I was in the process of hiring new people, which I put on indefinite hold," Hernandez says.
In other cases, groups received conflicting information about their grant funding from federal agencies, making it hard for them to budget for the future.
Adding to the challenge, the uncertainty created by the Trump administration could dissuade consultants and subcontractors from working on projects that are backed by the federal government, says Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former staffers and political appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency.
"They're going to have a hard time finding people that want to do business with them if they think that, 'Well, at any point, this project may lose its funding,'" Roos says.
Republican states could be hit hard
Fallout from the Trump administration's funding freeze is likely to hit especially hard in Republican-led states, which have been big beneficiaries of climate investments the government made through the Inflation Reduction Act.
"Our state is really going to take a big hit if these funds are pulled away," says Autumn Crowe, deputy director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, a conservation group.
Parts of West Virginia "have been left behind" for decades, Crowe says, but money had started flowing in from the Biden-era laws that Trump's now targeting.
"Their infrastructure is failing," Crowe says. "And without the federal government coming in to help support them, they're not going to be able to come up with that money on their own."
Similar concerns are rippling through the region, says Dana Kuhnline, senior program director at ReImagine Appalachia, an advocacy group.
"I think what sometimes gets lost in the story about Appalachia is that there is actually a tremendous amount of local energy and innovation, because people love the place, and they stay here because they love it," Kuhnline says. "And so you have a lot of folks with the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding who really had that first chance in a generation to start to kind of really do some big, big things."
Now, Kuhnline says, people will probably be wary of taking federal aid that looked like a lifeline just weeks ago.
"They tried to dream big and do a big economic improvement for their local community," she says, "and ended up in this really impossible situation."
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