After President Donald Trump tried and failed four times to slash federal support for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup during his previous term, this time he left the funding alone.

A detailed budget plan released by the Trump White House late last week would allot $92 million over the next fiscal year for the Chesapeake Bay Program, the bureaucratic octopus that’s coordinated the estuary’s restoration for over 40 years.

Maryland environmentalists had braced for Trump to again take a sledgehammer to the Bay Program, which falls under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but his funding request for the next fiscal year equals the amount earmarked for the program under the last year of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Funding for the EPA’s Bay Program has increased steadily since drawing $73 million at the start of Trump’s first term.

But the Bay Program’s earmark is cold comfort to many bay advocates. The Trump administration is pursuing dramatic cuts across other environmental and climate programs, including many that are important to the overarching restoration effort.

The president’s proposed budget would slash funding across the EPA by more than half, from $9.1 billion to $4.2 billion. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the scientific agency that leads research into climate change and conducts oceanographic studies in the bay, faces a $1.6 billion cut.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the largest nonprofit advocating for the bay, warned last month that Trump’s broad cuts would devastate the cleanup effort.

Close to the half of the proposed cuts at the EPA — about $2.5 billion, according to the Bay Foundation — target loan programs used by states to upgrade wastewater treatment plants, which are major drivers of nutrient pollution in the bay.

Another $1 billion in cuts zeroes out EPA grant programs used by states to control agricultural pollution, enforce the Clean Water Act and pursue bay restoration goals. Deep cuts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Geological Survey also could deplete conservation support for farmers and data used by states to inform their restoration strategies, the foundation said.

In a statement last month, Chesapeake Bay Foundation president Hilary Harp Falk said the White House spending plan would “unravel” decades of progress in the bay, choking off programs for restoring oysters, controlling farm run-off and researching water quality.

“These proposed cuts would leave already-strapped states struggling to meet their clean water commitments and manage natural resources,” she said.

Work to clean up the Chesapeake Bay has encompassed billions of dollars in public funding, but even its strongest proponents admit the effort hasn’t yielded the hoped-for progress.

The bay recorded its highest environmental grade in more than 20 years last summer — a C+, per the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences — but the restoration effort also missed a much-anticipated deadline to achieve a long list of environmental goals by 2025.

The next year’s federal budget remains in early stages on Capitol Hill, where neither the House nor Senate have approved spending plans yet.