Politics & Government Court: Trump Admin. Must Restore New Haven’s Frozen $31M In Grants Federal court orders restoration of EPA grants awarded the city for local climate, environmental, and clean energy projects.

New Haven, 6 cities, 13 non-profits, filed a lawsuit against Trump Administration challenging unlawful funding freeze that paused critical programs aimed at supporting residents, addressing various environmental, climate, public health, and agriculture. (Ellyn Santiago/Patch)

From the Office of New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker:

NEW HAVEN, CT — Tuesday, a federal court ordered the Trump administration to reinstate federal funding for critical municipal and community programs across the country, including three federal grants totaling $31 million awarded to New Haven by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for local climate, environmental, and clean energy-related projects and initiatives. In March, New Haven joined a coalition of six cities and thirteen nonprofit organizations in filing a federal lawsuit against the Trump Administration — The Sustainability Institute et al. v Trump et al. — which challenged the unlawful funding freeze that paused critical programs aimed at supporting residents and addressing various environmental, climate, public health, and agricultural challenges.

New Haven and 6 other states, 13 non-profits, filed a lawsuit against Trump Administration challenging the unlawful funding freeze that paused critical programs aimed at supporting residents, addressing various environmental, climate, public health, and agricultural challenges. The permanent injunction, filed on Tuesday by United States District Judge Richard Mark Gergel for the District of South Carolina, Charleston Division, will restore most of the grants included in this lawsuit, and the ruling represents the one of the first final judgments in a case challenging the Trump Administration’s actions.

“As a coastal city, New Haven is committed to tackling the challenge of climate change head on and building a greener, healthier and more resilient city for our residents. The $31 million in U.S. EPA grants that the City of New Haven has been awarded and obligated by the federal government are critical to advancing these efforts. Now with the U.S. District Court’s decision, we expect the Trump administration to respect and adhere to the judge’s ruling and provide unobstructed access to these funds so that we can move forward with these important local projects and initiatives,” said Mayor Justin Elicker. “Contrary to President Trump’s executive orders and actions, the way we ‘Unleash American Energy’ is by leveraging our country’s own renewable resources, including solar, wind and geothermal. It’s better for our pocketbooks, our environment and our national security, and we are encouraged that this ruling will allow New Haven and other cities and nonprofits across the nation to do exactly that.” New Haven’s three federal grants impacted by this ruling include:

$20 million from the EPA’s Community Change Grants Program for the Elm City Climate Collaborative, which includes 20 local partner organizations working to advance initiatives that benefit thousands of New Haven residents through investments in more energy efficient and cost-efficient homes, more accessible and greener transportation, and more resilient and safer neighborhoods, while also helping to create good-paying green jobs and educating Elm City children to engage in environmentally sustainable practices. $9.5 million from the EPA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants Implementation Grants for the Union Station Area Thermal Energy Network project, which is helping to finance a $16.5 million project to decarbonize Union Station and transition the region’s busiest transportation hub completely off fossil fuels while also creating a networked geothermal system to provide affordable energy bills for residents in the forthcoming Union Square housing development on Church Street South across from the train station. $1 million from the EPA’s Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Program for Electrify New Haven, which is helping New Haven residents transition their homes from oil heat to efficient heat pumps, reducing both heating costs and air pollution. Steve Winter, Director of New Haven’s Office of Climate and Sustainability, stated, “I’m thrilled that the court has blocked the Trump administration’s illegal and unjustified freeze of funding for important climate change and clean energy projects in New Haven. The work that our team does every day in partnership with City agencies and community partners helps improve air quality, lower energy bills, and address our climate crisis. The $31 million in federal funds unlocked by the court will advance a range of projects that will help New Havener’s breathe easier, save money on energy bills and transportation, and enjoy a greener and more resilient city.” The City of New Haven was represented by the Public Rights Project (PRP) who joined with the Southern Environmental Law Center’s (SELC) in collectively representing the 19 plaintiffs in the lawsuit. PRP is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to governments to help them win in court on behalf of their residents.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that EPA’s termination of $600 million in environmental justice grants issued by the Biden administration for low-income areas and communities of color was unlawful.

The ruling over the Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program comes as EPA is separately appealing a ruling that its termination of $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants was also unlawful. Congressional Republicans have proposed rescinding funding for both grant programs as part of their reconciliation bills.

The Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program was part of a $2.8 billion tranche of funding under the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act intended for community groups to provide block grants to address pollution that takes a disproportionately heavy toll on communities of color and low-income and rural areas.

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Announced in December 2023, EPA selected 11 groups to disburse the funds to subrecipients, a setup the Biden administration argued would help the groups cut through red tape and access the money more easily.

After weeks of speculation, the news came down with chilling formality:

“Dear EPA Grant Recipient,” read the official government email. “Attached is your Termination of Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”

That’s how hundreds of organizations found out they had officially lost EPA grant funding as part of the many cutbacks to environmental programs demanded by the Trump administration.

Among them was the Community Water Center, a nonprofit that works to provide safe, clean drinking water to rural communities in California. Their $20-million award had been earmarked for a major project to consolidate water systems in the low-income Central Coast communities of Pajaro, Sunny Mesa and Springfield, which have long been reliant on domestic wells and small water systems with contaminants above legal limits.

The project was more than five years in the making, and now sits in limbo as President Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin slash funding for more than 780 grants geared toward environmental justice that were awarded under President Biden.

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“It’s a huge disappointment — this grant would be funding an infrastructure project to deliver safe drinking water, and I think that everyone would agree that residents across the United States need to have safe drinking water,” said Susana De Anda, Community Water Center’s executive director. “Safe water is not political.”

The notice arrived on May 1, nearly two months after the EPA and the president’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency first announced that they would terminate more than 400 environmental grants totaling $1.7 billion in what Zeldin described as an effort to “rein in wasteful federal spending.” A leaked list reviewed by The Times revealed at least 62 California grants were on the chopping block.

Maria Terriquez shoves a shopping cart of supplies over the Pajaro River Bridge. She defied evacuation orders and remains in her apartment with two children. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

However, court documents filed last week indicate that the actual number of environmental grant cancellations in the U.S. is closer to 800. The finding is part of a lawsuit from nonprofit groups challenging the administration’s efforts to freeze funds awarded awarded under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as first reported by the Washington Post. A legal declaration filed by the EPA says 377 grantees have already received formal notices of termination, and approximately 404 more will be noticed soon.

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It is not immediately clear how many California organizations will lose federal funding. EPA officials declined to provide a list of affected groups and said the agency does not comment on pending legislation.

But a handful of groups in the state have confirmed they are on the list of cuts. Among them is the Los Angeles Neighborhood Trust, which said it lost a $500,000 grant intended to help plan equitable development projects along the L.A. River, and the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano, which said it lost a $155,000 grant for a project to provide food to communities in need in Vallejo.

Cade Cannedy, director of programs with the Palo Alto-based nonprofit Climate Resilient Communities, said the group lost a $500,000 grant that would have provided air purifiers to children with asthma and seniors with disabilities in East Palo Alto. The community suffers from high rates of respiratory issues as a result of decades of redlining, segregation and zoning practices that have concentrated polluting activities in the area, including hazardous waste processing facilities and vehicle emissions from nearby highways, Cannedy said.

“It’s a huge loss for our communities, but I think the other thing that’s really almost sadder is that for these communities, this is just another broken promise in a decades-long string of broken promises,” he said.

The termination email was the first communication the group has received from the EPA since Trump took office, he said. It represents a significant blow for the small nonprofit, which had already hired two new employees to help implement the project and deliver air purifiers to about 400 families and potentially some schools and senior centers.

“At small community-based organizations like ours, we never have excellent cash flow — it’s not like we’re sitting on half a million dollars at any point in time,” Cannedy said. “We’re dependent on these grants and the reimbursement process to make things work.”

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The grant cancellations are the latest in a string of actions from the Trump administration that advocates say are harmful to the environment, including loosening air and water quality regulations; laying off scientists and researchers; ramping up coal production; opening national forests for industrial logging; narrowing protections for endangered species and dismissing hundreds of scientists working a major national climate report, among many others.

Democratic lawmakers, including California Sen. Adam Schiff and Sen. Alex Padilla, have condemned the administration’s grant cancellations, which they say is an illegal clawing back of congressionally appropriated funds.

Residents of Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, many displaced by flooding in Pajaro, stand in a long line to receive supplies from Raices y Carino, (Roots and Love), at a Watsonville church, March 16, 2023. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

“EPA’s unlawful, arbitrary, and capricious terminations of [environmental justice] grant programs eliminate commonsense, nonpartisan federal programs that clean the air and water and protect Americans from natural disasters,” the senators wrote in a March letter to Zeldin, along with seven other Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

The EPA is potentially facing tighter purse strings. Trump’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would slash $5 billion from the agency tasked with protecting the nation’s health and environment — by far the largest cut in the EPA’s history, representing approximately 55% of its 2025 budget.

Meeting the reduction will require mass layoffs and would effectively cripple the EPA’s core functions, according to the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, a D.C.-based watchdog group composed of more than 600 former EPA workers.

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“This is a reckless and short-sighted proposal that will lead to higher levels of toxic pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink across the nation,” read a statement from Michelle Roos, the EPN’s executive director. “This is a wrecking-ball approach that would gut America’s front-line defense for protecting people’s health and environment.”

Indeed, the loss of grant funding will have lasting real-world effects, according to José Franco García, executive director of the San Diego County-based nonprofit the Environmental Health Coalition. The group lost a $500,000 grant intended for a number of initiatives in the Barrio Logan neighborhood, a predominantly low-income community that suffers from pollution, poor air quality and other environmental problems due to its proximity to the port, industrial facilities and an interstate highway, he said.

The projects included the creation of a long-awaited park along Boston Avenue, a green shuttle bus system, and efforts to improve area homes with electrification, solar power and lead abatement, García said. He said the grant was also going to fund air filters in homes of children with asthma.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin speaks at Nucor Steel Berkeley as he tours with Vice President JD Vance in Huger, S.C., Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque / Associated Press)

“These are the exact things that EPA money should be going to,” García said. “And what the current version of the EPA is doing is not what it was meant to do, what it was meant to be able to protect, and what it was meant to be able to serve.”

García noted that the grant cancellations are also costing nonprofits time and potentially jobs as they scramble to keep up with rapidly changing conditions. The grant was approved last summer and the group had spent months preparing to start the work.

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“Just as we are expected to meet the terms of any contract, we thought that the federal government would be as well,” he said.

De Anda, of the Community Water Center, was similarly concerned about the public health implications of the grant terminations.

The Monterey County communities of Pajaro, Sunny Mesa and Springfield have struggled with water quality issues for years, with 81% of domestic wells there testing positive for one or more dangerous contaminants including nitrate, 123-TCP, arsenic and chromium 6, she said. The chemicals can contribute to serious adverse health effects such as reproductive issues, infant blood conditions and cancer, according to the EPA.

The Community Water Center’s $20-million grant would have funded the first phase of critical infrastructure work, including constructing pipelines to physically consolidate the communities into a single water system owned and operated by Pajaro/Sunny Mesa Community Services District, which would serve about 5,500 people and an elementary school.

Community Water Center is exploring all avenues to keep the work moving forward, De Anda said, and she hopes state officials will step in to fill the void left by the EPA.

“Our community deserves to have reliable infrastructure that delivers safe drinking water,” she said. “Stopping the project is not an option.”

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One of the area’s residents, 49-year-old Maria Angelica Rodriguez, said she currently has to rely on bottled water for drinking, cooking and other basic needs. Every Thursday, a regional bottled water program delivers 5 gallons for each of the three members of her household, which include Rodriguez, her mother and her sister.

But she also worries about her 7-month-old grandson whom she babysits throughout the week, whom she fears could get sick from the area’s tainted water.

Speaking through an interpreter, Rodriguez said she would like Trump to stop and think about the children and also farmworkers in the area who need to drink the water.

The project brought hope to the community, she said, and its cancellation has made her very sad.

“El agua es vida,” she said: Water is life.

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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

Inside Climate News, Paul Horn

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.”

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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.

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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.

Inside Climate News, Paul Horn

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.

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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.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel a total of 781 grants issued under President Joe Biden, EPA lawyers wrote in a little-noticed court filing last week, almost twice the number previously reported. The filing in Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council v. Department of Agriculture marks the first time the agency has publicly acknowledged the total number of grants set for termination, which includes all of its environmental justice grants. It comes during court fights over whether the EPA has violated its legal obligations when clawing back the funds.

“EPA is in the process of sending out the formal termination/cancellation notices to all of the impacted grantees,” EPA career official Daniel Coogan wrote in the filing. “EPA has already sent out formal notices to approximately 377 grantees. For the remaining approximately 404 grantees, EPA plans to issue notices within the next two weeks.”

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Before the filing, the EPA had not confirmed that 781 grants would be canceled, although a list obtained by The Washington Post had shown more than 450 terminated or frozen grants totaling more than $1.5 billion.

The canceled grants would have funded a range of projects aimed at helping communities cope with the worsening effects of climate change. Recipients planned to use the money to seal homes in Washington state against wildfire smoke and protect Alaska Native villages from coastal flooding, among other things.

Most of the grants were issued by the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which the Trump administration plans to shutter as part of its efforts to remake the agency. Trump officials last week informed more than 450 employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion that they will be fired or reassigned.

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A coalition of environmental nonprofits, including the Providence, Rhode Island-based Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, is challenging the Trump administration’s move to freeze billions of dollars in funding under Biden’s signature 2022 climate law and the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021.

The watershed group has not been able to access a $1 million grant from the Forest Service since January. The lawsuit names as defendants the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Interior and Housing, along with the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget.

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy issued a preliminary injunction April 15 that required the agencies to release frozen funding while the litigation proceeds. McElroy, a Trump appointee, wrote that the nonprofit groups had shown the funding freeze was “arbitrary and capricious.”

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Before canceling any grants, the EPA is required to conduct a detailed review of each grant award. Coogan wrote in the filing that the agency had complied with this mandate.

“EPA leadership conducted an individualized, grant-by-grant review to determine which grants should continue, which should be modified, and which should be terminated based on alignment with Administration priorities or the purposes for which the Federal award was made,” he wrote.

Yet several lawyers and experts raised concerns that the EPA has not, in fact, conducted such a review and that the agency has misled the court.

“I can tell you from working with many, many of those grantees that the review has never happened,” said Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, a nonprofit group that has provided free legal assistance to several grant recipients.

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“They’re claiming to the court that each one of those was done on an individualized basis, even though they haven’t shown any evidence, and almost none of the grantees has received a termination notice,” Blanchard added. “Now some of them are starting to get those termination notices, but that’s well after the injunction order on April 15.”

Asked for comment, EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou said in an email: “In keeping with a long-standing practice, EPA does not comment on any current or pending litigation.”

Local officials say the terminations will undermine their ability to keep their constituents healthy.

For residents in Hampden County, Massachusetts, unhealthy air quality is a regular occurrence, and more than 49,000 children and adults suffer from asthma. A three-year, almost $1 million grant from the EPA was intended to support in-home environmental public health projects to reduce asthma risk.

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“By canceling these grants for Hampden County, the Trump Administration is undermining our efforts to improve the health of the people of Western Massachusetts,” Gov. Maura Healey (D) said in a statement last week. “This is just their latest attack on the health and well-being of communities across our country.”

Zealan Hoover, a former senior adviser to Biden’s EPA administrator, Michael Regan, said the canceled grants could have far-reaching consequences.