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Widespread federal layoffs bring even more uncertainty to the DAC hubs program.
Grant Faber suspected his short tenure as the program manager for the Department of Energy’s direct air capture hubs initiative was up when he saw an article circulating that the department was set to terminate up to 2,000 employees — generally those who were new to their jobs. When he hadn’t received any news by the end of the day on Thursday, February 13, he told me he felt a sense of “anticipatory survivor’s guilt.” But it wouldn’t last long.
“I woke up Friday morning and I was locked out of all my systems, and I had to get my termination letter emailed to my personal email address,” Faber told me. “It more or less just said it’s in the public interest to do away with your job.”
President Trump's campaign to fire federal workers has hollowed out the DOE's nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team, which sits within the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. When Trump first took office there were five employees on the CDR team, which helps to oversee implementation of the $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, Faber told me. Now, he said, there’s only one left.
Trump’s layoffs targeted probationary employees, i.e. those who had been hired, promoted, demoted, or reassigned within the past one to two years, who enjoy fewer job protections than those with longer tenures. Faber had been at his job for 11 months. His former boss, Rory Jacobson, was also terminated a few weeks ago, as he’d recently been promoted to a new role as director of carbon removal at the DOE. “To my knowledge, this was not about terminating people that were doing DAC work, or climate work, or even CDR work,” Jacobson told me. “This was just a gross termination of federal employees, career federal employees across the federal government that were on probation.”
But the cumulative effect of these layoffs certainly increases the air of uncertainty around the DAC hubs program, which thus far include two large-scale projects — the South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana’s Project Cypress — as well as 19 smaller hubs in earlier stages of feasibility and design development.
The various hubs’ commercial partners, which include universities, oil giants, and DAC startups themselves, were already mired in the limbo created by Trump’s Day One executive order, which froze funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That order also led to an effective communications embargo, which prohibits the DOE from discussing or taking action on things such as contract negotiations or personnel decisions with its external partners. These recent terminations just add to the confusion.
“We’ve had no communications with DOE for three to four weeks now,” the lead of one DAC hub in the feasibility study stage told me. “So we’re kind of just waiting to see what they tell us to do.”
In the meantime, awardees are frustrated and unsure where to turn, Jacobson told me. “Should they reach out to their congressperson and try to get them to advocate on their behalf? Do they send a letter to the White House? What is the next step to try and make things move for their projects?” These doubts pose a big problem for startups with novel technologies trying to build out large infrastructure projects, as they generally have smaller margins, less patient investors, and thus less room for error than industrial stalwarts with proven strategies. “Especially for these first-of-a-kinds, they are working on pretty dire timelines for project finance,” Jacobson said.
The DAC hubs were already off to a slow start, according to Jacobson, who told me that the $1.2 billion from the initial funding opportunity issued at the end of 2022 took much longer to get out the door than anyone hoped for. Project Cypress didn’t see any of its initial $50 million award until March of last year, and the South Texas hub had to wait until September for the same funding. Jacobson chalked up the delays to the fact that the awardees are generally relatively early-stage startups that have yet to build significant infrastructure projects, and that the DOE is unfamiliar with negotiating such large-scale proposals.
Thankfully the DOE’s small CDR division isn’t the only government entity interfacing with the DAC hubs. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is overseeing the buildout of the larger South Texas and Project Cypress hubs. And the National Energy Technology Laboratory is overseeing the implementation of the smaller DAC hubs, which are in the feasibility study and design planning stages. They’ve received a combined total of $121 million so far, though some are still negotiating the size of their awards.
OCED and NETL have also been impacted by the government-wide staffing cuts, however, potentially affecting their ability to pick up the slack from the decimated CDR team, which helped to provide top-level oversight and expertise. As Jacobson told me, his job was to “make a theory of change” that united the DOE’s various carbon removal initiatives, aligning them with the administration’s overall energy strategy, whatever it was. Absent this broader vision and explicit strategic direction, coordination among the various government agencies and implementation partners could suffer.
Day-to-day organizational details also stand to falter, Faber told me. In his role, he primarily provided oversight for the 19 smaller, earlier stage DAC hubs. “A lot of times, progress can come down to literally just things like getting signatures, getting approvals, communicating things to leadership back and forth,” he said. “If you don’t have a team in place coordinating those things at headquarters, everything’s just going to be more difficult.”
All that’s to say that further hold-ups could hit the hubs hard, especially the two large projects, which could eventually receive federal funding of up to $500 million to $600 million, provided the hubs can match that with funding from other sources. “If the DOE tries to back out or withholds funding and there’s uncertainty, then yes, it could severely delay or even kill some of those projects, or just result in massive reductions in their scope,” Faber told me. Perhaps other investors, such as climate tech VCs, would be willing to step in if this were to happen, he added.
Faber noted that one proof point that could give investors and other industry leaders confidence in this tech is the forthcoming large-scale DAC facility called Stratos from developer 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, which is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, Occidental is using the same technology for its South Texas hub — tech that the oil giant brought in-house when it acquired DAC startup Carbon Engineering in 2023. And Heirloom, a DAC company that’s helping to lead Project Cypress, also recently raised a huge $150 million Series B round, showing continued investor confidence in this technology.
The DAC hubs program also still has billions of dollars yet to be awarded. A few months ago, the DOE announced a new $1.8 billion funding opportunity for mid- and large-scale DAC projects. Interested parties have already submitted their required concept papers and pre-applications, with full applications due at the end of July. But the current chaos puts applicants in a tricky spot, as the new administration’s commitment to the program overall is now somewhat of a question mark.
That being said, Jacobson told me there’s no indication that either Trump or Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is necessarily opposed to DAC, or carbon dioxide removal overall. “I still don’t think that we’ve seen a clear signal that this administration is not excited about CDR,” Jacobson said. “I have not heard Secretary Wright say — or other leadership at DOE say — that we are not still very enthusiastic about DAC hubs.”
DAC buildout also has an array of bipartisan benefits, both Jacobson and Faber noted, and hasn’t been a target of right-wing ire in the way that electric vehicles and offshore wind have. On the contrary, Republicans (and oil and gas companies) often argue for it as a way to continue fossil fuel production in a world that’s moving towards lower-emissions sources of energy. Not to mention the fact that these DAC facilities are mainly being built in red states, thus adding jobs and GDP in these regions.
“I thought these kinds of projects would get to keep going,” the DAC hub leader, whose project has had elements halted, told me. “They’re creating jobs, they’re investing in technology. I think they could be well aligned with unleashing America’s energy dominance.”
But these days, few Biden-era initiatives are safe. As Faber told me, if the Trump administration chooses to take a hard line stance against “any and all government funding and regulation, and anything that even has a tinge of being associated with climate,” then DAC is going to have a target on its back, even if some congressional Republicans have previously expressed support for it.
The budget reconciliation process will give us more insight into the specific IRA and BIL funding provisions Trump and other Republicans are looking to axe. That same process will also determine the fate of tax credits such as 45Q, which encourages carbon capture and sequestration. In the near term, Democrats are pushing to get language into the government funding bill (which is separate from the reconciliation bill and must pass in some form by mid-March) that would require Trump to deliver congressionally appropriated money. If that happens, funds would start flowing to the DAC hubs — but don’t bet on it. Republicans are adamant that they won’t stand for such limitations on presidential authority.
DAC grantees, government employees, and implementation partners alike will have to do the wait-and-see thing for a while longer. “I do believe that when we get out of this fog of the first 100 days of the new administration, when they’re just trying to move fast and break things and get big headlines and try to make it seem like they’re keeping campaign promises, maybe things will slow down,” Faber told me. “Maybe they’ll get distracted or just move on to a new issue other than dismantling the federal government.”
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Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.
Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.
“This was an opportunity to repair some of that trust, through this project,” Emily Moose, the executive director of the sustainable agriculture organization A Greener World, told me in an email. Moore and her teammates spent years recruiting farmers from the group’s Oregon community, and eventually got 77 of them to sign up to create certified regenerative farm management plans. A Greener World was notified in January that its reimbursements were being suspended, and now risks losing $10,000 in incentive payments, meaning the farmers in the program “are now having to weigh paying for certification out of pocket or dropping the certification process entirely and losing market opportunities.”
Nicole Delcogliano, director of programs at the Organic Growers School, a farmer training organization in North Carolina, and a small farmer herself had similar hopes for a grant the group received to help mentor and educate early-stage farmers. The department had “finally started to build back a little bit of trust,” she told me. With the funding pause, she said, “I think that is going to be lost.”
Affected grants include billions set aside for the USDA through the Inflation Reduction Act for soil and water conservation projects, as well as more than $820 million earmarked for the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which incentivized agricultural producers to make energy-efficiency improvements on their land. Grants issued through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program for farm innovations that have greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration benefits — funded through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Dust Bowl-era entity more typically leveraged to protect farm income and prices during disasters — are also on pause. Original plans for the program under Biden would have seen it eventually scaled to 60,000 farms, reducing an estimated 50,000 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Though the Trump administration eventually released about 1% of the IRA-related USDA grant money in late February, much remains out of reach, with no timeline for payout. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition assumes that the “majority” of the $2.3 billion allocated to farmers on IRA-funded contracts is “likely still in USDA’s coffers.” Additionally, more than half of the $3.1 billion allocated to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program had not yet been paid out by the end of February, according to The Hagstrom Report, an agricultural news service. (The Trump administration has said it would reconsider REAP grants if applicants rewrite them to “remove harmful [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] and far-left climate features.”)
All of the affected grant programs work on a reimbursement basis, with the farmers incurring costs upfront protected, in theory, by a contractual guarantee that the government will pay them back. Individual farmers aren’t usually the direct beneficiaries of USDA grants, however. The USDA more commonly awards a grant to nonprofit organizations that, in turn, provide financial and technical support to farmers making sustainable transitions. Many of the nonprofits are now having to furlough or lay off staff. Meanwhile, farmers are still seeking their reimbursements, but there’s no funding there to pay them.
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that was awarded a Climate Smart Commodities grant and a Farm and Food Workers Relief from the USDA, is planning to furlough 60 people — most of her team — due to the pause. Another project director at a Mid-Atlantic sustainability nonprofit told me his organization has “been lending cash” from their own books since January 27, when the pause was announced, and that he anticipated being laid off shortly after our call.
But while the nonprofits are certainly hurting, the farmers are the ones stuck with the final bill. In addition to the USDA’s history of discriminating against Black farmers, many who manage smaller acreages report feeling overlooked by the federal government in favor of powerful agro-business conglomerates. More than 70% of farmers under age 40 reported being unfamiliar with USDA programs that could help them, and nearly half said they’d never received support from the agency, according to polling by the National Young Farmers Coalition published in 2022.
“In the last administration, there was recognition that they didn’t have the trust of a lot of farmers who historically haven't been served, or been underserved, by USDA,” Smith-Brubaker said. With programs like the Climate-Smart Commodities grant, the Biden administration “asked us to leverage the trust that we already have with farmers — to ask them to trust us to enter into this program.”
It worked: Many of the more than 30,000 contracted farms are already a year or two into multi-year projects with nonprofits designed to improve soil health, plant cover crops, or improve farm efficiency. That means they’ve already hired the extra staff for the projects, placed orders for new equipment, and set aside precious land for soil-enrichment projects.
But with no word on the future of their funding, some are now hesitating over whether to spend more money out of pocket on those projects if the government might not uphold its end of the deal. The pause has led many of the farmers I spoke with to reevaluate their trust in future USDA funding. “It’s unsettling because you’re like, ‘Well, if I implement the practices I’m supposed to, but then I don’t get that reimbursement sometime in 2025, what does that look like?’” said Delcogliano, who received one Conservation Stewardship Plan payment in October for her farm, Green Toe Ground, but hasn’t yet heard yet whether future payments will be affected.
Delcogliano also emphasized that despite the commodities grant containing the “buzz word” of “climate,” what it actually encourages are long-established practices that help conserve water and soil. “It’s just smart farming,” she told me. Ed Winebarger, a chef and farmer in North Carolina, told me he participated in the Climate-Smart Commodities program for a year and saw an immediate 20% increase in production. “My crops did better, the system works — period,” he said.
Small farmers who pursued the government grants likely would have been interested in the practices regardless of the financial incentives in many cases; Erin Foster West, the Policy Campaigns Director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told me the group’s research found nearly 85% of its membership was “motivated by environmental stewardship to farm.” Caroline Anderson Novak, the head of the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania — which is collaborating with Penn State on its greenhouse-gas-reducing Climate-Smart Commodities program, and which hasn’t received a notification of a pause from the USDA as other organizations have — told me that things like experimental feeds and sharper data assessments represent “operational improvements” that just happen to have attractive climate upsides. “They are things that the farm already wants to do,” she said.
What the grants do is provide the capital necessary for farmers to put these efficiency upgrades into practice. Margins, particularly at small farms, can be razor thin, and the risks of operational experiments can be steep. “A lot of the time, you would need to pursue a loan just to get started with the project,” Emma Jagoz, the owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland, who has hundreds of thousands in USDA grants tied up by the pause, told me.
As a result, farmers waiting for clarity on their grants generally have clear eyes about the root of the problem. “The organization that we work with, they can’t help the cuts. It’s not their fault,” Patrick Brown, who enrolled 90% of his North Carolina farm’s acreage in a climate-smart project, told me. “This administration has blatantly stated their approach.”
Kristin Reilly, the executive director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, a collective of small nonprofits in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that is helping its farming partners navigate the funding freeze, agreed that “the practitioners on the ground are definitely seeing that it’s not the nonprofits who are not paying them; they’re struggling along with them.”
Almost everyone I spoke with was pessimistic that the USDA would honor the grants, even as Earthjustice and other groups have launched lawsuits against the federal government over the freeze. (Pasa has joined a lawsuit with the Southern Environmental Law Center.) “I don’t think [the pause is] going to lift as long as this guy is in power because he’s so disconnected from reality,” Winebarger, the North Carolina chef and farmer, said of President Trump. “He’s never put his hands in dirt in his entire life. He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand my farming neighbors.”
Delcogliano shared a similar sentiment: “The government is incompetent,” she told me. “They’re not in touch with the people that are actually doing the work.”
Perhaps most crucially, while the federal money is paused, the climate continues changing. Any given season could bring a new drought or deluge that wipes out a farm entirely. Though separate from the troubles with the grant pauses, both Delcogliano and Winebarger are also recovering from extensive damage to their farms from Hurricane Helene, a process they told me has been made even more painful due to the lack of emergency funding available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Farmers will also be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of some of the tariffs the Trump administration plans to enact this week.
“It just feels like I’m driving behind a truck full of hammers that are dumping on me,” Winebarger said of the compounding problems. “And I can’t dodge them — they’re going to hit me. I don’t know how we’re going to get out from underneath this.”
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a Maine-based nonprofit that stands to lose a $35 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant, has begun to reformulate how its programs could continue with the support of buyer funds, state funding sources, or philanthropic dollars instead. It had once envisioned working with more than 400 partners over the grant’s lifespan, but that idea has given way to smaller-scale projects it can still afford.
“This is about so much more than climate change,” Ellen Griswold, the director of Wolfe’s Neck, stressed to me about the importance of finding a way forward with or without the government. “It’s about making farmers as resilient and profitable as possible. Without this assistance, there will be impacts to the farming community” — including farmers themselves and their suppliers. That could include a fencing company, nursery, or refrigerated truck dealer farmers can no longer afford to pay, or regional schools or food banks that are now forced to pay more for local, organic produce.
The reverberations of the grant pause will be felt far into the future, too. Even if the contracts are ultimately honored by the Trump administration, some farmers will undoubtedly feel justified in their suspicions of partnering with the federal government. Nonprofits will have more difficulty convincing community partners to take on voluntary climate projects down the line, and common-sense efficiency projects with climate co-benefits will stay dormant.
“If another opportunity comes along like this, I completely understand if farmers say, ‘No, I’m not doing that,’” Smith-Brubaker of Pasa said.