A Baltimore nonprofit focused on lead remediation and childhood asthma is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the Trump administration has illegally canceled and frozen tens of millions of dollars in grant funding in its attack on programs that support poor and overlooked communities.

Green and Healthy Homes Initiative says in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Maryland’s U.S. District Court, that the EPA wrongfully cancelled an $8 million grant and froze another $52 million earmarked to support environmental health work by organizations across the mid-Atlantic and Appalachia.

The Baltimore organization is joined in its complaint by nonprofits in Minneapolis and Seattle, each of which received a total of $60 million in EPA grant funding for environmental work in their regions. In total, the lawsuit alleges that the EPA has illegally blocked access to $180 million in promised funds.

If this funding is not restored, the lawsuit states, these three organizations will suffer “immense and irreparable harm.”

Already, the nonprofits have asked sub-grantees to curtail plans. If funding remains inaccessible, the nonprofits say, the EPA’s action will deal a severe blow to their communities, forcing them to “largely or entirely” shutter programs while investments by hundreds of partner organizations “would be wasted and come to an end.”

The lawsuit comes as President Donald Trump has curtailed the EPA’s focus on pollution in poor, often nonwhite communities that have historically felt the brunt of industrial impacts. Last month, Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out plans to eliminate “environmental justice” divisions across the EPA, while the agency has taken swift action to deplete staff and funding for low-income, polluted communities in the mid-Atlantic region.

The EPA press office declined to comment on the pending litigation “in keeping with longstanding policy.” The agency also declined to answer Baltimore Banner questions last month about the status of grants in the Mid-Atlantic region but touted “exciting steps” in its “next phase of organization improvements.”

The EPA selected Green and Healthy Homes, the Minneapolis Foundation and the Seattle-based Philanthropy Northwest to manage a total of $180 million distributed evenly between their three regions. Part of the EPA’s “Thriving Communities Program,” the money stems from a larger pool of Inflation Reduction Act funding dedicated to environmental and climate work in disadvantaged communities.

These three organizations have acted as grantmakers for groups and agencies across their regions. Projects eligible for funding through the programs could address community cleanups, food access, air-quality monitoring, stormwater infrastructure and household health problems such as asthma, asbestos and lead contamination.

But the three nonprofits received memos in late February canceling their initial $8 million grants, meant to help them staff up and begin outreach for grant-making, under what the lawsuit calls “vague, unsubstantiated reasons.”

Subsequent $52 million awards for each nonprofit, intended as grant funding for groups across their regions, remains frozen and inaccessible, according to the lawsuit.

Each of the memos cited Trump’s aims to defund “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “environmental justice” initiatives, informing the three nonprofits that their grants no longer met agency goals.

“It is a priority of the EPA to eliminate discrimination in all programs,” the memos stated, according to the complaint. This included ending support for DEI and environmental justice work, which the memo said conflicts with EPA policy “to prioritize merit, fairness and excellence in performing our statutory functions.”

Though the EPA’s definition of environmental justice encompasses all racial groups, Trump and Zeldin have targeted these types of programs alongside “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

By terminating these initial grants, the three nonprofits argue, the EPA has violated numerous federal laws and its own grant-making regulations. The EPA’s move to cancel funding also undermines a 2022 amendment to the Clean Air Act, the lawsuit argues, that mandates spending on environmental justice work in disadvantaged communities.

At the same time, suggestions in the EPA’s memo that funding was canceled for “fraud, waste and abuse” don’t come with even “a hint” of evidence to back up the claim, the lawsuit states.

If funding is not restored, Green and Healthy Homes said in its complaint that it likely would have to lay off eight to 10 employees.

In total, the Baltimore nonprofit has hired nine new staff members to oversee implementation of the funding over the three-year term of the Thriving Communities Program, while eight other employees spend at least part of their time on it, according to the lawsuit. Philanthropy Northwest, the Seattle-based nonprofit, logged 8,800 staffing hours in 2024 on implementation of the EPA program.

As of February 20, Green and Healthy Homes had pledged grants to 63 organizations across the EPA’s mid-Atlantic region. That includes a dozen in Maryland, 13 each in Virginia and West Virginia, 17 in Pennsylvania, six in Washington, D.C., and two in Delaware.

In a joint statement to The Banner, Green and Healthy Homes, the Minneapolis Foundation and Philanthropy Northwest said the EPA’s termination and suspension of funding has “violated constitutional and statutory requirements regarding funds approved by Congress.”

“This has disrupted $180 million of critical funding, harming our organizations, communities and the people we serve,” the three nonprofits said.

Among the grants highlighted in the lawsuit, Green and Healthy Homes had pledged $280,000 to a West Virginia nonprofit to prevent sewage overflows into the local drinking water system and $350,000 to remediate dangerously high levels of lead contamination at a park on the banks of the Ohio River.

The Baltimore nonprofit said its complaint that it has asked partners like the Children’s National Hospital to stop providing technical assistance to grantees amid the funding stoppage. Children’s National Hospital had partnered with Green and Healthy Homes to support groups fighting childhood asthma.