As the nation marked the 55th anniversary of the environmental movement on Earth Day, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin declared a renewed commitment to “clean air, land and water for all Americans.”

But as he spoke the EPA was choking off the funds that had promised to bring clean drinking water to a rural Black community in Maryland, to farmworkers in California and to tribal villages in Alaska. The money was also meant to tackle cancer-causing radon gas seeping into rural homes in Utah and help monitor air pollution in communities wracked with respiratory illness in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor.

All had received grants from EPA programs that have emerged as the prime targets of the budget-cutting knife under President Donald Trump: those devoted to environmental justice.

An Inside Climate News analysis, which relied on federal government spending data and a Trump administration filing in federal court last week, confirms the austerity program that Zeldin is executing — part of what he calls a “commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars” — has focused almost entirely on cutting spending on poor and minority communities.

The agency’s termination list involves at least 384 primary grants worth more than $2.4 billion, according to ICN’s analysis.

The eight programs on the EPA’s chopping block include the entire environmental and climate justice block grant program that Congress approved in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation. The grants were designed to boost access to clean air, water and land in communities living in substandard conditions or bearing a disproportionate burden of pollution.

But, in the Trump administration’s reframing of the government’s environmental mission, such programs are a form of favoritism. They have been lumped together with the equal-opportunity diversity, equity and inclusion programs that the administration has vowed to eradicate. And Zeldin’s EPA has resisted releasing funding for these programs, despite a federal judge’s April 15 order that the hold on the grants be lifted.

The Trump administration gave notice Wednesday that it would appeal that order, after spending two weeks unsuccessfully arguing the environmental justice programs weren’t covered by the ruling because decisions to terminate those grants had already been made.

Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island last week expressed frustration as she held a series of status hearings over the Trump administration’s failure to unfreeze all of the grants under the IRA and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as she had ordered.

“It seems as if there’s a lot of, ‘Let’s see where we can push this as far as we can push this,’” she said, “trying to parse words and come up with a meaning that the court didn’t intend.”

Now, the grantees’ lawsuit to unfreeze the funding they had been awarded by the EPA and four other federal agencies will move to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But an even larger legal question has yet to be litigated: whether the executive branch has, in fact, illegally seized the power of the purse from Congress by terminating the entire environmental justice block grant appropriation that lawmakers made in the Inflation Reduction Act.

“These are illegal terminations,” said Sacoby Wilson, director of the Health, Environmental and Economic Justice Lab at the University of Maryland. The lab is part of a partnership that received a notice that its grant had been terminated on Feb. 21. “They mentioned that these are no longer EPA priorities, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what these grants were meant to do.”

The programs, he said, were based on decades of study showing some communities are bearing a disproportionate exposure to the pollution that flows downstream or drifts miles from its source to affect far larger populations.

“They stopped these programs and projects and initiatives under the guise — under the rhetoric — of things being unfair, unequal, a giveaway,” Wilson said. “These projects and partnerships are really at the core of helping the EPA to fulfill its mission to protect the environment and public health.”

For now, hope of improvement is dimming in communities across the country that had only recently begun to find help in raising their living standards to meet those enjoyed by the majority of Americans.

No longer a priority

Trump called for the agencies to terminate environmental justice grant programs as part of his anti-DEI executive order, signed on his first day in office. Turning on its head the notion that such programs are meant to address historical and ongoing disenfranchisement, Trump said they were themselves a form of “shameful discrimination.”

“Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” he said in his executive order.

The EPA is canceling all programs that have “environmental justice” in their names, even the individual grants on the clean water and air issues that Zeldin has said are his primary focus. Inside Climate News asked the EPA specifically about its decision to terminate one grant that would bring clean drinking water to a low-income community that is not served by local water utilities.

“The agency determined that the grant application no longer supports Administration priorities, and the award has been cancelled,” the EPA press office wrote in an unsigned statement. The statement went on to say that the administration thinks environmental justice has been used as “an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups.”

In a March 10 announcement about the cuts, Zeldin said he had saved taxpayers more than $2 billion. But the EPA has never released a list of the terminated grants. The agency has not responded to an Inside Climate News Freedom of Information Act request.

Inside Climate News gathered data on the targeted grants from a declaration that the EPA filed in court last week detailing publicly for the first time the specific programs “slated to be terminated.”

ICN searched the USAspending database for all grants awarded under these programs, filtering out any grants that had concluded before Feb. 13, when Zeldin began targeting the programs for termination. That resulted in 384 primary grants worth more than $2.4 billion — less than $50 million of which has already been paid out to the recipients. (Download a spreadsheet with information on the targeted grants and details of the ICN analysis.)

The EPA’s declaration said it was terminating a total of 781 grants. It is unclear how the agency came up with this larger number. The EPA press office offered no clarification, citing the pending litigation.

Only one program not directly related to environmental justice is being terminated. It aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing of steel and other construction materials. Although the Biden administration said it intended to fund 38 organizations with nearly $160 million under this program, ICN’s analysis shows that just one grant, worth $6.7 million, was awarded before Biden left office.

All told, more than 99% of the awarded money that Zeldin has targeted for termination is related to environmental justice.

Slightly more than half of the funding cuts would come in Democratic congressional districts.

But some Republican districts also are seeing big hits because Zeldin is targeting programs that provided large grants for tribal communities.

The member of Congress who stands to lose the most awarded EPA grant money is Rep. Nicholas Begich, the newly elected Republican representing all of Alaska, with $151.9 million in assistance targeted for termination.

One example: the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a 62-year-old nonprofit organization that works on advancing self-determination in 39 tribal villages in Alaska’s interior, had been awarded $20 million starting Jan. 1 for a wide-ranging two-year plan to build energy-efficient housing and improve existing homes, increase access to drinking water and sewage services and to shore up climate resilience in areas beset with erosion.

The EPA offered no clarification on whether a freeze on all grants, or only some, would continue in light of the government’s appeal of the court order.

“In keeping with a longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on pending litigation,” the agency’s press office said in an emailed response to Inside Climate News.

The EPA told the court that the majority of the environmental justice program grantees had yet to be notified of their terminations, and some grantees even have received conflicting notices. Some have been sent notices, in rapid succession, that their grants would continue and that their grants were terminated, said Jillian Blanchard, vice president for climate change and environmental justice at the nonprofit group Lawyers for Good Government.

“It’s incredibly frustrating, demoralizing and confusing for these grantees, who had legally binding agreements with the federal government,” Blanchard said.

She said she is confident the grantees are on firm legal ground and have a good chance of winning their cases, if they have the resources to continue a fight that the Trump administration has shown no sign of giving up. Said Blanchard, “It’s going to be a matter of these organizations being able to financially withstand that delay.”

Inside Climate News reporter Martha Pskowski contributed to this story.

Note: Founded in 2007, Inside Climate News is the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. It is nonprofit and non-partisan and exists to publish essential reporting, investigation, and analysis about the biggest crisis facing our planet.