Courtroom Battles and Federal Bureaucracy Freeze Vital Pollution Relief and Extreme Heat Grants Promised to Vulnerable Black and Brown Neighborhoods
Trump’s EPA killed a Biden-era grant program aimed at communities hit hardest by pollution. Courts disagree over whether the agency must bring it back.
Overview:
A legal battle over $2.8 billion in environmental justice grants has left projects serving Black and brown communities in limbo — and with the program’s spending deadline approaching, the clock is running out.
In the early days of the Trump 2.0 administration, as federal departments slashed programs under DOGE, the Environmental Protection Agency turned its eye to the $2.8 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program as a potential target for budget cuts.
Funded under former President Joe Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act, the program was intended to help under-resourced communities on the front lines of climate change. The Trump-era EPA quickly cut the block grant program entirely.
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Then, when it shut down the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the EPA fired all staff members who managed the grants. Environmental groups sued.
We had all these plans to do all these great things. Then they pulled the rug out from under us.Christian Wells, University of South Florida
Since then, the EPA has claimed it couldn’t revive what, in essence, would be a brand-new and fully funded office and program.
“We had all these plans to do all these great things,” Christian Wells, the director of the Center for Brownfields Research and Redevelopment at the University of South Florida, told Inside Climate News about the $15 million EPA grant awarded to help address runoff pollution in Tampa’s University Area, a historically Black neighborhood. “Then they pulled the rug out from under us.”
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