Federal workers living in Wisconsin and Minnesota are among those who have been placed on administrative leave by the Environmental Protection Agency after they voiced concerns about politicization of the agency.

Hundreds of current and former EPA employees signed a letter opposing the administration’s policies, saying they undermine the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment. In response, the EPA placed 139 workers on paid leave and launched an investigation into those who signed the letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

The letter, which now lists more than 600 anonymous signers, outlined five key concerns about the Trump administration’s decisions: undermining public trust with political messaging; ignoring scientific research to benefit polluters; canceling environmental justice programs; dismantling the agency’s Office of Research and Development; and sowing fear among workers.

Stay connected to Wisconsin news — your way Get trustworthy reporting and unique local stories from WPR delivered directly to your inbox. Email Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

The decision has affected half a dozen staff at EPA’s lab in Duluth, according to sources with knowledge of the situation. Nicole Cantello, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, represents about 1,000 employees in the Great Lakes region. Cantello, who signed the letter, called the move a great overreaction by the agency.

“We think they’ve completely overstepped here. These employees have rights,” Cantello said. “They have not really considered, prior to putting people on administrative leave, the amount of harm it’s causing the American people by having these people sidelined.”

Cantello said union officials believe employee concerns outlined in the letter are protected by the First Amendment and federal whistleblower laws. The letter was organized by the group Stand Up for Science, which was formed this year in the wake of federal cuts.

WPR contacted around half a dozen EPA employees, and most did not return calls. One agency worker, who spoke to WPR anonymously for fear of retaliation, said they were distressed after being placed on leave.

Cantello said workers will remain on leave through July 17, noting the agency could extend that period.

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, appears before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Washington. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

EPA claims letter misleads the public

The EPA said it placed 139 workers on leave because they used their official titles and positions within the agency when signing the letter, which it claims misleads the public about agency business. The agency said the letter represents a “small fraction” of the EPA’s thousands of employees.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” an EPA spokesperson said in an email.

Cantello said the EPA had not yet taken action to question or gather information from employees. She said the union will use every avenue available to protect workers under investigation, including legal action if necessary.

“What they want to do is come back and work for the American people and keep the environment safe here in the Great Lakes,” Cantello said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

Several Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives wrote a July 8 letter to Zeldin about the agency’s actions. They said the EPA’s move is “plainly illegal” and a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. They called on the agency to immediately return employees to work and brief the Energy and Commerce Committee on “the alleged basis for (the EPA’s) illegal action.”

As EPA workers have been placed on leave, the U.S. Supreme Court has also cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume mass layoffs or “reductions in force” at agencies. Cantello said the EPA is taking steps to conduct layoffs, but the agency is not revealing details.

The New York Times has reported more than 1,100 workers could be laid off under the EPA’s plan to dissolve its Office of Research and Development, which would include the Duluth lab. Cantello said that’s on top of about 1,300 employees of the department who have resigned as of mid-June.

House Republicans on Monday released their 2026 spending bill for the Interior Department and EPA. It includes a 23 percent cut to the EPA’s budget. The bill would reduce the agency’s budget by about $2.1 billion compared to President Donald Trump’s proposed $4.9 billion cut.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it plans to rescind and reconsider limits on four “forever chemicals” under a landmark drinking water standard implemented last year by President Joe Biden. The drinking water rules were adopted as part of the Biden administration’s efforts to limit public exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), hazardous chemicals linked to a range of serious illnesses. The original rule covered six common PFAS contaminants, including PFOA, a known human carcinogen, and PFOS, a likely carcinogen.

The EPA estimates that more than 158 million Americans are exposed to PFAS through their drinking water.

The agency plans to maintain current rules for PFOA and PFOS, though it will extend the deadline for compliance from 2029 to 2031.

In its announcement, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the changes will “protect Americans from PFOA and PFOS in their drinking water” while providing “common-sense flexibility in the form of additional time for compliance.”

Advertisement

The EPA did not provide additional comment, but during a congressional hearing Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) pressed Zeldin on whether the agency would “weaken” PFAS standards.

“That is not accurate,” Zeldin said in response. “That is not what the agency announced.”

The EPA chief added that the agency will kick off a lengthy process for revising the PFAS limits. “But that doesn’t mean that it gets weaker,” he said. “The number might end up going lower, not higher.”

The agency’s action follows the release by the White House in March of a 36-page “National Strategy to End the Use of Paper Straws” that detailed the dangers of PFAS, which some paper straws contain. It said the chemicals are “harmful to human health, and they have been linked to harms affecting reproductive health, developmental delays in children, cancer, hormone imbalance, obesity, and other dangerous health conditions.”

Advertisement

PFAS are a large class of persistent chemicals that repel grease, water, oil and heat, and are used to make a wide array of consumer and industrial products. Scientists have found these chemicals in the blood of almost every American and have detected the compounds in remote regions of the planet, such as Antarctica.

The regulations adopted last year gave the 66,000 public water systems in the United States until 2029 to comply with the new standards. Under the rule, the maximum contamination level for PFOA and PFOS was set at 4 parts per trillion. Three other compounds — PFHxS, PFNA and GenX — were limited to 10 parts per trillion. In addition, the water standard required utilities to use a “hazard index” to monitor for a mixture of the chemicals, as well as a fourth, PFBS.

In June, trade associations representing water utilities filed suit against the EPA, challenging the science and data underlying the drinking water standard and its timetable for meeting it. According to the agency’s estimates, the standard would cost utilities about $1.5 billion a year.

Advertisement

Under the agency’s new plan, the regulations covering PFHxS, PFNA, GenX and PFBS will be rescinded and reconsidered. The agency plans to begin a new rulemaking process in the fall and to issue a new rule next spring. The agency also said it plans to start a program called PFAS OUT to “share resources, tools, funding, and technical assistance to help utilities meet the federal drinking water standards.”

Erik Olson, the senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group that is a party to the lawsuit, said the Safe Drinking Water Act’s “anti-backsliding” provision bars the agency from repealing or weakening the drinking water standard.

“The law is very clear that the EPA can’t repeal or weaken the drinking water standard. Any effort to do so will clearly violate what Congress has required for decades,” Olson said. “It shows that this administration doesn’t really care about protecting people’s drinking water from toxic forever chemicals that endanger the health of over 100 million Americans.”

Advertisement

Water utilities praised the move.

“EPA has done the right thing for rural and small communities by delaying implementation of the PFAS rule,” said Matthew Holmes, CEO of the National Rural Water Association, a trade group, in the announcement. “This commonsense decision provides the additional time that water system managers need to identify affordable treatment technologies and make sure they are on a sustainable path to compliance.”

Alan Roberson, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, said that “EPA’s proposed extension of the compliance date and increased technical assistance will address the number of systems that would be out of compliance in 2029 due to not being able complete all of these tasks on time.”

The American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, said the Biden-era regulation was not consistent with the state of the science, and that it imposed steep costs on water utilities.

Advertisement

“EPA’s actions reflect efforts to address the concerns of water utilities and local governments, focus on national drinking water priorities, minimize the impact on water bills, and ensure consistency with the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act,” the ACC said in a statement.

Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said the agency’s decision to remove restrictions on the known substitutions for PFOS and PFOA was concerning.

“It’s too bad. We know these chemicals are dangerous. We know their adverse health effects. The more we study them, the more problems we face,” Birnbaum said. “If anything, the science is stronger today than it was a year or two years ago.”

GenX has been linked to kidney and liver toxicity, immune and development effects, and cancer in rats, according to an EPA toxicity assessment.

Advertisement

Experts say that in the absence of federal regulations, more emphasis will be placed on the states to safeguard drinking water from PFAS pollution.

More than two dozen states have introduced almost 200 bills this year to address local PFAS issues. Lawmakers in North Carolina, for example, have proposed a bill that would require PFAS manufacturers to cover the cost of cleaning up drinking water contaminated by GenX and other chemicals.

“Our bipartisan bill specifically tackles GenX, one of the compounds which will now have looser regulation,” North Carolina state Rep. Robert Reives (D) said in an email. “I am disappointed but not surprised by the prospect of these rescissions. We know these forever chemicals are toxic to humans.”

Emily Donovan, who lives near Wilmington, North Carolina, an area affected by the release of GenX into the Cape Fear River, said that communities will bear the brunt of the EPA’s decision.

“The idea that they want to rescind and reconsider GenX is a victory for chemical companies,” said Donovan, who co-founded a grassroots advocacy group called Clean Cape Fear. “This isn’t a win for American public health.”

Despite distancing himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump’s early actions have taken plenty of inspiration from the conservative policy playbook created by think tank the Heritage Foundation. A Time analysis conducted in January found that nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump issued during his first days in office mirrored, either in full or in part, proposals in the 900-page document. This includes withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. Since then, Trump has continued to draw from Project 2025 when it comes to his cuts to the government’s climate efforts—from targeting national monuments and the weather service, to culling scientists from the Environmental Projection Agency.

Advertisement Advertisement

The deregulatory push mirrors the Heritage Foundation’s long history of opposing climate action. The think tank has also had a close relationship to the administration over the years. According to CNN, several former Trump staffers helped shape Project 2025. And during Trump’s first term, both the president and members of Congress cited a Heritage study on the economic costs of climate action that was found to be “strongly influenced by the subjective assumptions made by study authors,” according to a review by the World Resources Institute. (The report concluded that participation in the Paris Agreement would result in an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion by 2035. That’s compared to a 2024 estimate by the Climate Policy Initiative that puts the global cost of inaction at $1,266 trillion.) Read more: 1 in 5 People Say Climate Change Has Had a Big Impact on Their Daily Lives Here are the major ways that the Trump Administration is enacting the Project 2025 goals for targeting environmental regulations and climate action in the United States.

Advertisement

Withdrawing from International Climate Agreements Project 2025 called for the U.S. to withdraw from the Paris Accords, the landmark climate initiative aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On his first day in office,Trump did just that, issuing an executive order to initiate the process. The playbook has also proposed that the U.S. withdraw entirely from the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC), an intergovernmental body which facilitates negotiations on climate change. Trump has said that the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. would submit formal written notification of this, though it has yet to happen. Project 2025 also opposed U.S. participation in climate reparations funds, arguing that any fund administered by a non-U.S. organization “provides no assurance that U.S. interests will be protected.” Following through on this, in early March the United States withdrew from the board of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, created to help developing countries respond to the impacts of climate change.

Advertisement

Targeting the National Weather Service Project 2025 calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and other agencies the group deemed “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Read more: The True Cost of Trump’s Cuts to NOAA and NASA The document called for NOAA to be “broken up and downsized,” which the Trump Administration is in the process of doing. In February, the Trump Administration attempted to fire hundreds of NOAA employees. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the move in March, but though the employees were reinstated by the Department of Commerce, the staffers were placed on administrative leave pending further litigation. The decision is already taking a toll. In mid-March, NOAA said it would reduce weather balloon launches—which provide key data for weather forecasting—in several locations due to staffing shortages.

Advertisement

Reviewing National Monument Designations The Antiquities Act of 1906 authorizes the president to protect federal lands that are of historic or scientific importance. Under the Biden Administration, the government used this act to establish, expand, or restore eight national monuments totaling more than 3.7 million acres. The Heritage Foundation nodded to this in Project 2025 by calling for the “review” of those monument designations, saying that President Biden “abused his authority” in protecting those lands. A recent study from the Center for American Progress and Conservation Science Partners, however, found that the establishment of those monuments played a significant role in reducing the “nature gap” and providing access to nature deprived communities. The Heritage Foundation also called for a repeal of the Antiquities Act. Read more: Here Are All of Trump’s Major Moves to Dismantle Climate Action

Advertisement

Trump targeted the Antiquities Act during his first term, directing the Secretary of the Interior to review national monuments that had been designated in the past two decades. Two national monuments in Utah were downsized as a result, though the Biden Administration restored its original boundaries. The Trump Administration has not yet issued any orders on the Antiquities Act, however the Washington Post has reported that the White House has plans to eliminate two national monuments in California established by the Biden Administration. Reshaping the U.S. Global Change Research Program Project 2025 calls for an Executive Order to “reshape” the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a federal effort to study the impact of human and natural forces on the environment. The organization is responsible for the National Climate Assessment, which researches the impact of climate change in the United States. It also puts together the National Nature Assessment, which looks at the state of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife. In the weeks after Trump took office, three science reports relating to climate change—two of which are mandated by Congress—were removed from the USGCRP website, according to Politico.

Advertisement

Reviewing FEMA’s Effectiveness The Project 2025 blueprint calls for “reforms” to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the organization responsible for responding to natural disasters in the U.S. Among the proposals include privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and shifting the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and cities. Trump has echoed this goal; on Jan. 24th, the president announced a council to assess FEMA and its effectiveness. The privatization of the NFIP would place the burden of responding to floods—and covering the costs incurred by these disasters—on cities, especially as flood insurance is not covered by standard insurance policies. As climate change worsens, floods are becoming more devastating. The number of flood-prone areas around the country is expected to grow by nearly half by the end of this century. Extracting Natural Resources in Alaska

Advertisement

The conservative blueprint refers to Alaska as a “special case” that “deserves immediate action” and calls for previously protected lands to be opened up for drilling and mineral extraction. The plan also calls for the end of wildlife and water resource protections and the approval of logging and infrastructure projects in the Tongass National Forest. “Alaska has untapped potential for increased oil production, which is important not just to the revitalization of the nation’s energy sector but is vital to the Alaskan economy,” the document says. Trump has signed an executive order implementing this, and the U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently announced that the department would be taking steps to open up more acreage for oil and gas leasing and lift restrictions on building a pipeline and mining road in the state. Culling EPA Staff In a chapter focused on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Project 2025 said that the EPA’s staff and activities, “far exceeded its congressional mandates and purpose.”

Advertisement

Read more: What Legal Experts Say About Trump’s Sweeping EPA Deregulation

The document also calls for “reform” of the Endangered Species Act. It calls for the delistment of the Grizzly Bear and Gray Wolf as endangered animals and wants an “end its use to seize private property, prevent economic development, and interfere with the rights of states over their wildlife populations.” It also plans to abolish the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey, an agency that provides scientific research to support the conservation of public lands and their resources.

In March, Trump announced planned cuts to the agency, including the elimination of the Office of Research and Development, which would impact over 1,000 employees, including scientists. Also in March, the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries said it will consider legislation put forward to amend the Endangered Species Act. It will also consider a separate bill to remove the Gray Wolf from the endangered species list.

While the Trump administration has taken aim at many aspects of Joe Biden’s White House agenda, one program has drawn particular scrutiny: $27 billion in grants for combating climate change and boosting clean energy. President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, has sought to claw back $20 billion of the program’s total $27 billion from Citibank, which was tasked with disbursing the funds, while the Justice Department and FBI have launched a criminal investigation into the grant program.

But no evidence has emerged of any illegal activity in connection with the funds, and a detailed review by The Washington Post shows that the Trump administration has made several false or misleading claims about the program. At the same time, the review documented several concerns from experts inside and outside government about the program’s complexity and the decision to make large awards to relatively few recipients.

Advertisement

Commonly known as a “green bank,” the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund authorized a landmark $27 billion for recipients to invest in green technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles and more.

When it was announced, the program was celebrated by climate advocates as a transformational, first-of-its-kind initiative to deploy clean energy in communities across the country. Now, as some grant recipients struggle to survive a funding freeze and court battles, it has become a political punching bag on the right — and the focus of a fight over Biden’s sweeping climate legacy.

This account of how the EPA designed, launched and administered the program is based on interviews with more than a dozen Biden administration officials, grant recipients and outside experts, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. The Post also reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including grant applications, ethics agreements, legal filings and meeting minutes.

Advertisement

Asked for comment, EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said in an email that Zeldin “has continually stressed the need to be able to conduct proper oversight to be accountable for every penny expended from the agency. These transparency and accountability efforts have been hamstrung by the intentional manner in which the Biden EPA set up these programs.”

Vaseliou added that “GGRF is a $27 billion program, the agency’s annual operating budget is somewhere between $8-10B.” She did not respond to follow-up questions about how much of the targeted $20 billion had already been spent.

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in an email that Zeldin “is doing a wonderful job of saving billions of tax payer dollars by eliminating unnecessary federal spending.”

The early efforts

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was born in August 2022 when Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping Democratic bill aimed at tackling climate change and lowering health-care costs.

The program had three parts: the $14 billion National Clean Investment Fund, which was aimed at helping finance clean-energy technologies nationwide; the $6 billion Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, which was meant to encourage investment in these technologies in disadvantaged areas; and the $7 billion Solar for All program, which sought to boost access to solar energy in low-income communities.

Congress required the EPA to award all $27 billion by Sept. 30, 2024 — about a month before Election Day.

Advertisement

“We did craft it with the motivation to have EPA stand up the program quickly to save it from the risk of potential future repeal efforts,” a Democratic aide with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee told The Washington Post in 2023.

Other Democratic staffers and lawmakers defended the deadline as standard. The roughly two-year timeline was similar to those of clean-energy grant programs established by President Barack Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

“Without deadlines, many times agencies allow for a process to continue longer in a way that’s unnecessary,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts) said in an interview this month. “Ultimately, time was of the essence because it was based on the urgency of the climate crisis, and we wanted to ensure that this money was deployed as quickly as possible.”

Advertisement

The deadline set off a scramble inside the EPA, according to half a dozen former and current agency officials.

“We were on a tight timeline because Congress gave us a two-year shot clock,” said Zealan Hoover, a former senior adviser to Biden’s EPA administrator, Michael Regan. “But notwithstanding that timeline, we provided significant opportunity for everyone to submit comments, give input and join different stakeholder meetings.”

Biden officials tapped Jahi Wise to be acting director of the EPA’s Office of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Wise joined the EPA from the White House, where he had spent nearly two years as special assistant to the president for climate policy and finance, crafting some of the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy finance provisions. Before that, he had worked for the Coalition for Green Capital, a group that has advocated for green banks for more than a decade.

Advertisement

In a recent letter to the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, acting EPA deputy administrator W.C. McIntosh alleged that Wise may have violated conflict-of-interest rules because he “personally oversaw a $5 billion grant to his previous employer” — the Coalition for Green Capital.

But Wise consulted with ethics officials and recused himself from involvement with any grant applications by the Coalition for Green Capital, according to recusal materials viewed by The Post and legal filings by the group. He also went on parental leave from September 2023 to December 2023 during the grant awards process.

By the time Wise returned from leave, the EPA had appointed a longtime career employee to lead the office on a permanent basis. Through his lawyer, Wise declined to comment.

In November 2022, the EPA solicited public comment on how to structure the program, receiving hundreds of submissions. Throughout the fall of 2022, the EPA also sought advice from the Environmental Financial Advisory Board, a group of outside experts, on a key question: Should the $27 billion go toward one enormous grant, a few big grants or several smaller grants?

Advertisement

In the end, the experts felt they didn’t have enough time to give the agency formal recommendations, so they opted instead to provide pros and cons for each option, according to a review of the board’s meeting minutes and interviews with three current or former board members.

The application process

The following summer saw a flurry of activity. In July 2023, the EPA spelled out the requirements for applicants in a 72-page notice of funding opportunity for the National Clean Investment Fund and a 74-page notice of funding opportunity for the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator — the two parts of the program that the Trump administration would end up challenging.

The agency specified that credit unions and community lenders could not directly receive the grants, but could apply as part of broader coalitions. To meet these requirements and maximize their chances of success, several such entities forged alliances with other groups.

In a recent news release, Trump’s EPA accused the grantees of creating coalitions “out of thin air for the purpose of receiving these funds.” Many of the coalitions, however, were composed of groups that collectively had decades of experience and billions of dollars in revenue. Power Forward Communities, for example, initially included the veteran home-building organization Habitat for Humanity International and the environmental nonprofit Rewiring America.

In his speech to Congress this month, Trump also claimed that Power Forward Communities was “headed up” by Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democratic politician. In fact, Abrams served as an adviser to Rewiring America, according to Rewiring America spokeswoman Kathleen Scatassa.

Advertisement

Once the window for submissions closed in October 2023, hundreds of employees from across the federal government helped review them. Nearly 50 employees reviewed each application under the National Clean Investment Fund and nearly 40 assessed each submission under the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, according to a former EPA official briefed on the matter.

The reviewers used a complex scoring system, assigning up to 1,000 points to each applicant for a range of criteria. For applicants to the National Clean Investment Fund, 30 points were awarded for a “community engagement plan.” Twenty points for “climate and air pollution benefits.” Fifty points for a “financial risk management plan.”

Senior officials from the EPA and other agencies then reviewed the highest-scoring applications and made recommendations to EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe, who made a final decision, according to the former EPA official familiar with the matter. McCabe declined to comment.

Advertisement

In April 2024, the EPA formally announced that it had selected eight applicants to receive the $20 billion in grants under the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, with Vice President Kamala Harris traveling to Charlotte to tout the funding. The decision to award so much money to just eight organizations drew criticism from some budget experts.

“What made me a bit nervous on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, especially compared to what Obama did with the Recovery Act, was that it had very few grant recipients,” said Sanjay Patnaik, who directs the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution. “If you have very few recipients and one is a failure or wrongly spends the funds, the risk to the taxpayer is higher.”

After the selections, each grantee provided a “workplan” based on its application that detailed what it planned to accomplish with the money. For instance, Climate United Fund — which received the largest grant award, nearly $7 billion — said it would spend one-quarter of the money on electric vehicle deployment, including efforts to replace diesel school buses with electric versions.

Power Forward Communities, which won a grant award of $2 billion, said it would provide financial assistance for households to buy electric appliances such as “heat pumps, induction stoves, rooftop and community solar, electric vehicles (EVs) and more.” The coalition projected it would help more than 75,000 households reduce their energy bills, create nearly 65,000 jobs and prevent more than 3.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

The dispute

One unsuccessful applicant, however, challenged the grant selection process under the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Ecority — a network of credit unions and state and local green banks — filed a formal dispute with the EPA, arguing that the process was flawed, according to documents viewed by The Post.

In particular, Ecority alleged that at least four of the successful applicants had failed to meet all of the eligibility requirements, the documents show. It also asserted that there were major discrepancies between the scores that different reviewers gave the same submissions.

Ecority declined to comment on the allegations, which have not been previously reported.

It is not unusual for rejected applicants to challenge the results of government grant competitions, especially when billions of dollars are on the line. The EPA assigned an independent arbiter to assess the validity of Ecority’s claims. The arbiter ordered the agency to redo the entire scoring process for the two grant competitions, the documents show.

As the arbiter’s investigation progressed, the Treasury Department was initially tasked with disbursing the $20 billion in grant awards under the National Clean Investment Fund and Clean Communities Investment Accelerator. Treasury began to dole out the funds in August, but the agency withheld about $4.3 billion from the grantees in case the arbiter decided that the money was owed to Ecority instead, according to the documents.

In September, Treasury and Citi entered into a financial-agent agreement, which tasked the bank with disbursing the $20 billion instead. The bank was not responsible for the $7 billion under the Solar for All part of the program, which has faced fewer attacks from Trump officials.

Zeldin has claimed that the arrangement with Citi was unprecedented. “Roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” he said last month.

While the EPA had not previously used a financial-agent agreement, other federal agencies have frequently relied on them since the mid-1800s. During Trump’s first term, Treasury in 2017 tapped the Bank of New York Mellon, now known as BNY, to disburse billions of dollars under three separate programs.

Still, the Biden agency’s watchdog raised concerns about the program’s timeline and complexity when testifying before Congress in September.

“This pace of spending escalates not only the risk for fraud but also the urgency for oversight,” then-EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on environment, manufacturing and critical minerals. “I cannot say enough about how complex these programs are going to be. It is as if the agency is funding an investment bank.”

In November, the arbiter concluded that the successful applicants did, in fact, meet the eligibility requirements. The next month, she found that after the EPA rescored the submissions, Ecority still didn’t rank among the top applicants. She presented her findings to the acting EPA deputy administrator, who was tasked with deciding whether to alter the awards.

That career employee, who had replaced McCabe upon her retirement, decided not to change the awards. The recipients were then able to access the remaining $4.3 billion in their accounts at Citi.

The Trump administration has claimed that all $20 billion went out the door after the November election and before it took office. “NONE of the money was transferred out of the federal government until AFTER Election Day,” Trump’s EPA wrote in a recent news release. “That was evidently on the part of the previous administration to ensure it did not remain in the newly-elected Trump Administration’s hands.”

But the Biden administration withheld the $4.3 billion until after the election because of the ongoing dispute process. The grantees were able to start drawing down the other $15.7 billion from Treasury in August and from Citi in November, according to a Biden administration official familiar with the matter.

The ‘gold bars’ video

Even as groups tapped the new funding, on Dec. 3 a video began circulating online of an EPA employee saying the Biden administration was “trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they come in and stop it all. … It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing, like, gold bars off the edge.”

Project Veritas, an organization that often uses covert videos and false cover stories in an attempt to embarrass government officials, Democrats and journalists, recorded the video of Brent Efron, who served as a special adviser at the agency.

Daren Bakst, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the Trump administration is right to raise alarm about the video.

“When a former Biden administration official said the EPA was throwing gold bars off the Titanic, this is a genuine reason for concern,” Bakst said in an email. “Not figuring out what happened would be absurd, and to its credit, the Trump administration EPA is taking action to figure out what did in fact happen.”

However, the EPA had announced the grant awards months before the video was filmed. And Efron had “nothing to do with the evaluation and selection” of the recipients, said a former EPA official briefed on the matter.

A lawyer for Efron did not respond to requests for comment.

The path forward

The program’s woes intensified last month when Zeldin vowed to recover the $20 billion, saying Citi “must immediately return all of the gold bars.”

Climate United Fund CEO Beth Bafford had just tucked her kids into bed when her phone lit up with messages about Zeldin’s announcement. Bafford said she spent the next couple of hours on the phone with colleagues trying to figure out “what this meant for us and how we needed to respond.” The next day, when Climate United tried to access its account at Citi, the funding was frozen, she said.

The following week, the head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. resigned after refusing to comply with a directive to order Citi to freeze the accounts for 30 days. In her resignation letter, Denise Cheung wrote that she did not believe there was “sufficient evidence” that a crime had been committed.

On March 11, Zeldin announced that he would not only target the funds at Citi but also terminate the grant contracts themselves. Three grantees — Climate United, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities — are now suing the EPA and Citi over those decisions. And two members of Power Forward Communities — Habitat for Humanity International and United Way Worldwide — have left the coalition’s board, citing the uncertainty and costs of the litigation.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington issued a temporary restraining order that prevents the EPA from reclaiming the money from Citi. Chutkan ruled that the agency had not presented any “credible evidence” of fraud or abuse.

However, the ruling did not revive the recipients’ ability to access the funds, postponing that decision until after further court proceedings. In the meantime, many grantees are struggling to pay employees and putting key projects on hold.

In Georgia, a developer has halted the construction of EV charging stations near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that would allow travelers to refuel their rental cars. In Louisiana, schools are still waiting for promised money to install heat pumps, LED lighting and other energy-efficient appliances that could reduce their energy costs by more than 20 percent.

The fate of these projects and hundreds of others now depends on the courts. Hanging in the balance is not only a key part of Biden’s climate legacy but also the legitimacy of federal grant competitions and the speed of the nation’s shift to clean energy.

Nicolás Rivero, Spencer S. Hsu and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

Grant recipients across the country are holding their breath as the Environmental Protection Agency reviews scores of “environmental justice” grants, calling into question the future of projects meant to provide clean drinking water and disaster shelters to underserved communities — some of which are in Republican districts. At the direction of President Donald Trump, the EPA has targeted billions of dollars in grants for termination and confirmed this week that the agency will shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, created under the George H.W. Bush administration.

Under special scrutiny is the office’s Community Change Grants Program, a pool of about $2 billion from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at helping communities prepare for natural disasters and generally improve environmental conditions. Specific projects include installing solar panels in low-income neighborhoods and improving stormwater infrastructure in areas hit hard by hurricanes. All of the grants under the program are under review, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes.

Advertisement

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement released this week, the agency said it had “identified and canceled more than 400 additional grants across nine unnecessary programs totaling $1.7 billion in savings for the American people,” though it did not specify the Community Change Grants Program.

“Some believe that so-called ‘environmental justice’ is warranted to assist communities that have been left behind,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement on closing the environmental justice office. “But in reality, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities.”

Daren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, a free-market think tank, said that community change grants are another example of the “waste from the partisan Inflation Reduction Act” and that the entire program is “out of touch with reality.” He added that disadvantaged communities need affordable electricity, not solar panels.

Advertisement

“There are plenty of reasons for the EPA to do what it can to stop this waste and to protect taxpayers,” Bakst said. “All Americans will benefit from stopping such misguided spending, and if we want to help disadvantaged communities, let’s focus on real solutions not pushing environmental extremism.”

The latest grant suspensions come as the agency has announced plans to dismantle some of former president Joe Biden’s most consequential climate and environmental regulations, including rules covering electric vehicles, power plants and clean water. Last month, Zeldin announced that the agency would seek to claw back $20 billion awarded under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program also established under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Contaminated water has been a constant concern in Pocatello, Idaho, where nitrate levels in local wells prompted the small city to seek federal grants to build sewer systems in areas without them.

Advertisement

Pocatello, the seat of Bannock County, where two-thirds of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, scored a major win in July when the EPA awarded the city $16.5 million to undertake a sewer project that would greatly improve water quality — not only in Pocatello, but throughout the surrounding valley.

The project is underway, Pocatello Mayor Brian Blad said in an email, but the grant money is not flowing — as the EPA reviews and cuts grants awarded under environmental justice programs.

“The reimbursement system for the grant program is currently not active, which means the City is unable to process any reimbursement payments for the work we are completing,” Blad said. Although the pause won’t cause immediate delays, “we do not have the resources to cover the expenses indefinitely.”

Some community change grants are already slated to be terminated, according to planning documents reviewed by The Washington Post. Those provided funds to build community centers, known as “resilience hubs,” where residents can gather during and after natural disasters. Grants to build hubs in Denver and Butte-Silver Bow, Montana, are listed among those to be canceled, according to the documents.

Advertisement

The community change grants were “magical,” said Matthew Tejada, who served in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights from 2013 to 2023 and now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.

“For the first time in generations, communities across our country had some hope that their government was going to give them a hand up. And just as they were starting to make some real change happen in their communities, their government is letting go,” Tejada said.

“Shovel-ready projects are now going to die on the vine, and it means communities are going to have an even harder time making use of any other government programs,” he added.

In North Richmond, California, $19 million awarded to improve conditions for residents neighboring a Chevron refinery has been suspended, according to John Gioia, a member of the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors. The grant, awarded in December, would have funded the construction of a resilience center and improvements to homes aimed at energy efficiency and reducing exposure to pollutants.

Advertisement

“The grant is really designed to improve people’s health,” Gioia said in an interview. “And it is unfortunate that the EPA, without understanding the details of the projects, cancels a grant to improve the community.”

Other grants are paused, such as $19.4 million awarded to Lee County, Florida, which was devastated by Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, in 2022. The grant, awarded in December, is meant to help the area enhance stormwater infrastructure, improve water storage and build four resilience hubs in Fort Myers meant to boost emergency preparedness. Though more than half of voters in Fort Myers voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, two-thirds of Lee County voters cast ballots for Trump.

Dawn Belamarich, president and CEO of the Collaboratory, the nonprofit managing the Lee County project, confirmed that the funds were paused but declined to comment further.

Advertisement

In Pocatello, a grant cancellation for the sewer project would be especially troubling, said Sarah Godsey, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at Idaho State University. A decade ago, Godsey tested about 100 private wells in Pocatello and found that septic systems were probably contaminating the drinking water supply. The high nitrate levels, she said, could be especially harmful to pregnant women and lead to blue baby syndrome, when a baby’s skin turns blue because of a shortage of oxygen in the blood.

Godsey said planning to improve the water supply has been in the works for years, and the recent infusion of federal funding was a relief. Pulling the money back would present a remarkable setback, she said.