Trump’s EPA ends ‘radical’ environmental grants that fight pollution in Houston
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EPA cuts for Houston, expected deregulation of pollution could create ‘perfect storm’ for worse air quality – Houston Public Media
Houston Health Department lost $1 million for a solar power and native tree project in Fifth Ward. Air Alliance Houston also saw a pause on $3 million in funding for pollution permit notifications to 10 Gulf Coast counties. The city’s health department confirmed in early April that it lost $42 million in federal funding, including $12 million in personnel costs. The EPA didn’t directly answer questions about the grant, writing “the agency is reviewing its awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars””There is a need for this work in the community,” Air alliance Houston Executive Director Jennifer Hadayia said. “There’s a need to know what pollution is happening in their community” The EPA in March described its actions as “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history”
Dave Fehling/Houston Public Media
As President Donald Trump’s administration slashes federal spending deemed wasteful, the Environmental Protection Agency cancelled $1.5 million in funding for a project to build out a solar energy farm, create a resilience hub and plant trees in Houston’s long-polluted Fifth Ward neighborhood.
The grants included $500,000 for nonprofit Black United Fund of Texas and $1 million for the Houston Health Department. They would have funded the first two stages of the “Fifth Ward: Vulnerable to Vibrant” project intended to train community members on solar energy installation, establish a solar-powered resiliency hub for use during extreme weather and reduce heat, flooding and pollution by planting native trees.
On its website, the Houston Health Department said it’s “exploring other avenues that can potentially be pursued to fulfill the activities.”
Houston City Council last year accepted an additional $20 million from the EPA for the project’s third stage, intended to fund “the final stepping-stone in establishing a community solar farm” and “provide free or reduced-price electricity plans” for residents who have been affected by underground, cancer-causing contamination linked to a site owned by the Union Pacific Railroad.
“The purpose of that project is to uplift communities that have been challenged by environmental injustices,” Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer for the Houston Health Department, told Houston Public Media at the time.
The Houston Chronicle reported the $20 million grant was “suspended.” A spokesperson for the city’s health department told Houston Public Media the grant “has not been cancelled.” Asked whether the funds were frozen, the spokesperson said the department “does not have any further comment at this time.”
Lucio Vasquez / Houston Public Media
A spokesperson for the EPA didn’t directly answer questions about the grant, writing “the agency is reviewing its awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.”
“The agency’s review is ongoing,” the EPA spokesperson said.
The city’s health department confirmed in early April that it lost $42 million in federal funding, including $12 million in personnel costs, representing about a quarter of its $170 million annual budget. A spokesperson declined to say if the $1 million grant for the Fifth Ward project was part of the $42 million in cuts.
The EPA also paused $3 million in funding for a program run by Air Alliance Houston, which in 2022 began notifying community members in Harris County of companies seeking pollution permits in their areas.
The automated program sent postcards to homes around polluting facilities about upcoming permit hearings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and it included an online map of pollution permits. The grant would’ve expanded the program to cover 10 Gulf Coast counties over the next three years.
“There is a need for this work in the community,” Air Alliance Houston Executive Director Jennifer Hadayia said. “There’s a need for people to know what pollution is happening in their community. There’s a need for people to know how they can get involved. And now that these funds are frozen, we are not able to implement that program to meet those needs.”
Hadayia said the canceled grants, coupled with the expected rollback of rules and regulations tied to the Clean Air Act, create “a perfect storm for our air quality to be worse and for ultimately the health of our population to be worse.” The EPA in March described its actions, including the reconsideration of rules regulating air toxicity standards and pollution from oil and gas production facilities, as “the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”
Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
“The FBI has told Citibank that recipients of EPA climate grants are being considered as potentially liable for fraud. That is, the Trump administration wants to criminalize work on climate science and impacts,” the @capitolhunters account wrote Wednesday on X.
The Appalachian Community Capital Corporation, the Coalition for Green Capital, and the DC Green Bank are just some of the nonprofits being targeted.
“This is not fraud. This is targeted harassment,” @capitolhunters continued. “The idea of criminalizing community climate work wouldn’t have originated at the FBI—it likely comes from EPA director Lee Zeldin, who today cut all EPA’s environmental justice offices, which try to reduce pollution in poor and minority communities.”
‘Billionaires Over Life on Earth’: Trump EPA Guts Vast Array of Environmental Protections
Zeldin said in a statement that the U.S. needs to step up to the next level. “If they get their way, they will …,” she added. “We are … taking us back to the beginning of the story,” she said. “This is a … story that we will never forget,” she continued. “It is a story that will never … be the end of this story,” the author said, “but it will be the start of a new one.” “We … are … going to have to find a way to make this story a little bit better,” the writer said, referring to the story of the next step in the story. “The story is just beginning,” she wrote. “And it’s going to get better and better and … and … the story is going to be a lot more exciting” The story will be told in the next few days, when the next stage of the game begins. “What happens next?” the author asked. “I don’t know,” she replied, “and I don’t want to.”
Zeldin—a former Republican congressman from New York with an abysmal 14% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters—said in a statement that the EPA “will undertake 31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.”
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S., and more,” Zeldin said. “Alongside President [Donald] Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission.”
In one of the biggest moves of the day, the EPA will reconsider its endangerment finding, which the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) described as “the landmark scientific finding that forms the core basis of federal climate action.”
“Removing the endangerment finding even as climate chaos accelerates is like spraying gasoline on a burning house,” said Jason Rylander, legal director of the CBD’s Climate Law Institute. “We had 27 separate climate disasters costing over a billion dollars last year. Now more than ever the United States needs to step up efforts to cut pollution and protect people from climate change. But instead Trump wants to yank us backward, creating enormous risks for people, wildlife, and our economy.”
Zeldin said the EPA is “eliminating all diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental justice offices and positions immediately,” a move that will result in the closure of 10 regional facilities. The EPA chief explained the move complies with Trump’s executive order on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferences” and other presidential directives.
The agency also moved to cancel a $2 billion grant program to help communities suffering from pollution.
“This is a fuck you to anyone who wants to breathe clean air, drink clean water, or live past 2030,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led climate group Sunrise Movement, said in a statement accusing the Trump administration of choosing “billionaires over life on Earth.”
“The Trump administration is trying to roll back decades of critical health and safety regulations that have saved millions of lives and are all that’s standing between us and runaway climate change,” Shiney-Ajay continued. “Trump doesn’t care about working people, all he cares about is pleasing the oil and gas billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. They know their industry is dying. Wind and solar are cheaper and safer than fossil fuels.”
“So, they are trying to buy their way to profitability by rigging the rules in their favor,” she added. “If they get their way, they will wreck our air, our water, burn down our homes, and hand future generations an unlivable climate.”
TRANSLATION: Fuck you and fuck your future. Corporate polluters can dump sewage in your water, spew toxic gas into your air, and double down on burning the fossil fuels driving us into climate apocalypse. Billionaires can do whatever they want, and everyday people can eat shit.
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— Sunrise Movement ( @sunrisemvmt.bsky.social) March 12, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Matthew Tejada, a former deputy assistant administrator at the Office of Environmental Justice for over a decade before leaving the EPA in December 2023, now serves as senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He toldCBS News Wednesday that “generations of progress are being erased from our federal government.”
“Trump’s EPA is taking us back to a time of unfettered pollution across the nation, leaving every American exposed to toxic chemicals, dirty air, and contaminated water,” Tejada said in a separate NRDC statement Wednesday.
Tejada continued:
The grants that EPA moved to cancel are some of the most important to help make communities across the nation safer, healthier, and more prosperous. They are helping rural Virginia coal communities prepare for extreme flooding, installing sewage systems on rural Alabama homes, and turning an abandoned, polluted site in Tampa, Florida into a campus for healthcare, job training, and a small business development.
Those who have paid the highest price for pollution, with their health, are now the first to be sacrificed by Trump’s EPA. But they will not be the last. Every American should be worried about what this portends. We are witnessing the first step of removing environmental protections from everyone, as the chemical industry and fossil fuel producers get their way—and the rest of us will pay with our health and lost legal rights.
On Tuesday, the EPA also canceled grant agreements worth $20 billion issued during former President Joe Biden’s administration as part of a so-called green bank meant to fund clean energy and climate mitigation projects. The move prompted a lawsuit by Climate United Fund, a nonprofit green investment fund.
In another alarming development, The New Republicreported Wednesday that the FBI under Director Kash Patel is “moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration.”
Responding to Zeldin’s sweeping actions Wednesday, the environmental group Sierra Club said the EPA is “attacking safeguards to limit pollution from power plants and vehicles, methane and other deadly emissions from oil and gas sources, mercury and air toxics standards, the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, wastewater regulations at coal plants, and many other critical protections for the environment and public health.”
“The standards that the EPA seeks to undermine are based on a strong scientific record and serve a number of public interests, including lowering the amount of deadly toxins fossil fuel-fired plants are allowed to release into the air and water; reducing pollution at steel and aluminum mills; and requiring fossil fuel companies to control pollution like soot, ozone, and toxic and hazardous air pollutants at power plants,” the group continued.
“If these rules are withdrawn, the American public will see devastating health impacts,” Sierra Club warned. “EPA estimated that just one of the rules would prevent 4,500 premature deaths and save $46 billion in health costs by 2032. The health toll and cost of rescinding all the rules listed in the EPA’s announcement would be vastly higher.”
“Donald Trump’s actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year.”
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said: “Donald Trump’s actions will cause thousands of Americans to die each year. It will send thousands of children to the hospital and force even more to miss school. It will pollute the air and water in communities across the country. And it will cause our energy bills to go up even more than they already are because of his disastrous policies. But as they put all of us at risk, Trump and his administration are celebrating because it will help corporate polluters pad their profit margin.”
David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen’s Climate Program, said that “no matter how the EPA disguises the decision to roll back pollution rules, today’s moves will make our air and water dirtier and make Americans sicker.”
“Zeldin is granting the wishes of Trump’s billionaire corporate cronies, plain and simple, at a massive cost to our health and wallets,” he added. “The announcement flies in the face of the EPA’s core mission to protect human health and safeguard our environment.”
Green groups vowed to fight the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental protections and justice.
“Come hell and high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives,” said CBD’s Rylander. “This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”
Jealous of the Sierra Club said, “Make no mistake about it: We will fight these outrageous rollbacks tooth and nail, and we will use all resources at our disposal to continue protecting the health and safety of all Americans.”
Trump funding freeze could leave communities on their own as climate threats grow
The Trump administration is cutting off federal funding for climate change initiatives. The move is part of President Trump’s plan to roll back environmental and climate change programs. Federal judges have halted the freeze, but contractors and activists say money is still being held back. Without federal support, American communities will struggle to deal with climate change, analysts and environmental advocates say. The fight over climate funding looks far from over, experts and attorneys general 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. “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,” she 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,” says Zara Ahmed, vice president of policy and advisory operations at Carbon Direct. “We wouldn’t be able to move forward without it”
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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.
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“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.”
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‘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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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“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.”
How we’re fighting the Trump administration’s dangerous agenda
EDF has been fighting for a better future for over 50 years. We’re stepping up that fight as the Trump administration moves to erode the United States’ environmental protections.
No one wants to live in a dirtier world. But that’s the direction the administration’s policies are taking us: More pollution that harms people’s health. More toxic chemicals in air and water. Escalating extreme weather, fueled by a hotter planet.
Plans to abandon clean energy investments will make America weaker, sending jobs to other countries, raising energy prices and burdening future generations with worse pollution, storms and wildfires.
But history isn’t preordained — it’s shaped by the actions we take together. We can’t stop working in tough times. In this pivotal moment for America, here’s how EDF is showing up for the fight.