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Now back at the University of Pennsylvania, she talks to Heatmap about community engagement, gaps in the decarbonization market, and goats.
In November of 2020, Jennifer Wilcox had just moved to Philadelphia and was preparing to start a new chapter in her career as a tenured “Presidential Distinguished Professor” at the University of Pennsylvania. Then she got the call: Wilcox was asked to join the incoming Biden administration as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy, a division of the Department of Energy.
Wilcox had never even heard of the Office of Fossil Energy and was somewhat uneasy about the title. A chemical engineer by training, Wilcox had dedicated her work to climate solutions. She was widely known for having written the first textbook on carbon capture, published in 2012, and for her trailblazing research into removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. With Penn’s blessing, she decided to take the job. And in the just over three years she was in office, she may have altered the course of U.S. climate action forever.
First, Wilcox led a total transformation of the department to align it with the Biden administration’s climate goals. She started by arranging 15-minute meetings with each of the nearly 150 employees who worked with her at the D.C. office to understand their perspectives on their work, whether they were happy, and their fears and challenges. She admits she can be intense.
“I took all that information, and I sat on it with many weekends and a blank piece of paper and a pencil and drew crazy diagrams,” she told me, trying to funnel everyone’s feedback into a new vision for the department.
Previously, the Office of Fossil Energy’s primary function was to support research into oil, gas, and coal extraction and use. Wilcox flipped the mission on its head, reorganizing the department into one that would support research, development, and deployment of solutions that reduced dependency on those resources and minimized their environmental impacts. By July, she had codified that mission in a new name — the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
Wilcox maxed out her leave this spring. I caught up with her about a week after she left the DOE, as she was picking up where she left off — preparing for her first semester as a professor of chemical engineering and energy policy at Penn. She’s also starting a new side gig as chief scientist at Isometric, a carbon credit certification company that’s trying to improve trust in carbon removal measurement and verification through rigorous standards and transparency.
I asked her to reflect on her time at the Department of Energy, the changes she oversaw, and what she’s looking to do next. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When was your last day at DOE? Did you leave because you had an obligation to come back to Penn?
My last day was Friday, May 31, so just a week or so ago. Typically, when you’re in an academic tenured position, you can have a maximum of a two-year leave. Within the first year of my appointment at DOE, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law went through, and then in the second year, the IRA went through — the Inflation Reduction Act. And I was like, this is big stuff. It felt like just a defining moment — in my career, but also in terms of climate legislation. And I thought, how could I possibly leave now? So I went back to Penn and I wrote, I thought, a pretty thoughtful letter of the impact that I could have if I could stay just a year and a half longer. And they said yes.
Could you share the story of how you were asked to go work for the department in the first place?
Sure, it’s pretty funny. Something that many people don’t know is we have a small farm — we had 22 acres in Massachusetts, and goats and a pig and chickens and oh my goodness. Penn was like, “We’ll move your goats, too,” and so we moved everybody. And here I am at the kitchen table amidst boxes, and the goats are outside, and I’m on my laptop, and I get this email from the Biden-Harris transition team. I was like, ain’t nobody got time for that. That’s spam. Delete! And then a couple days go by and I get another one, and I was like, come on. Is this real? And I forwarded it to my husband. He’s an ER doctor, and he’s like, “Honey, that’s real. You have to respond!” And so I sent my CV.
One of the first things you did was rename the department. How did that happen?
When I came in, it was really early days of, okay, net zero by 2050, and there was a question of, what does that mean for our office? Should this office exist in a net zero world?I knew that I was being recruited to think about reshaping, rethinking the portfolio.
We only had two R&D offices at the time. One was called Oil and Gas — we renamed that Office of Resource Sustainability. The other was literally the Office of Coal. What I decided to do was take that program and move it over. That whole office is all about, if you’re choosing to extract energy resources from the Earth, how do you do it in a way that’s minimal impact?
Now, what’s left is how you manage the pollution of how we use fossil fuels — that’s the carbon dioxide. And so we built out a whole new division on carbon removal. We teased out a whole program on hydrogen, and then we also separated out carbon conversion into its own division, and then carbon transport and storage. And so rather than one program focused on carbon, we had five, which is pretty cool. I mean, the amount that I was empowered and supported — and by the way, we got it all through without a single pushback, in nine months. So that was huge.
How would you characterize how the field changed from the time that you entered the office until now? Have research questions changed? Have policy priorities changed?
I think things are starting to change. One of the things from these last few years of having the resources that have started to become mobilized, it’s helping us to recognize where the gaps really are. When you have money to be able to put out for certain topic areas, you get to see who’s going to apply, and who applies gives you an indication of where the technology is at and how much of it’s ready.
For instance, if you look at the $3.5 billion for direct air capture hubs, we had to write the funding opportunity announcement to meet industry where they’re at. There’s only a couple of companies that are really even at a stage where they can start to think about demonstration on the tens of thousands of tons of removal, let alone a million tons per year.
Some of the gaps that we saw were, in direct air capture, making sure that there’s enough companies that are supported to be able to get us to the scale that we need to. And then for the other approaches to carbon removal, making sure that if we want these projects to be durable, in terms of carbon removed on a time scale that impacts climate, we need to figure out how to quantify the net carbon that’s removed.
And then one significant gap that we saw that we are trying to fill with this funding: When we think about corporations and net zero pledges, a lot of times the carbon removal purchasing is associated with Scope 3 emissions that companies don’t have the ability to control. These are supply chains. It could be paper, it could be fuel, food, glass, cement, steel. And so looking at that whole sector, it’s about 10 different industrial sectors that we need to figure out how to decarbonize. If we can think about decarbonizing these supply chains, it’ll take some of the pressure off of the carbon removals to counterbalance those.
The last piece that I feel like gets forgotten is, in the infrastructure law, we had $2.5 billion for building out geologic storage. That’s an issue because you can do the carbon capture, but the big question is, where are you going to put it? And can you get it from point A to point B? We have a whole program called CarbonSAFE that essentially shepherds the industry through the process, starting with characterization all the way to a class six permit from EPA. Building that capacity out means that’s one less thing that industry has to worry about as they’re looking at carbon capture.
During your time there, the department was interfacing with hundreds of researchers and startup founders who were all trying to get new projects or companies off the ground. I’m curious, what are some of the most common misunderstandings you saw from applicants?
There’s a couple of things, but one that stands out — and maybe this is because I have a background in academia — there’s a lot of technologies out there that are actually pretty far along, especially in point source capture [technologies that capture carbon from the smokestacks of industrial facilities before it enters the atmosphere]. Yet, at universities, they’re still trying to develop the next solvent or solid sorbent. It’s like, we can stop doing that.
Where the R&D comes in is actually getting data over a long period of time. How does the material behave? How can we recycle it and reuse it over and over again? How can we design it in a way that reduces NOx, SOx pollution, particulate matter, making the air cleaner? But it’s not about how do we just develop a new technology, because there’s a lot out there.
It seems like one of the hardest things the department was trying to do under your leadership was to strengthen its work on community engagement and community benefits — hard because many advocates for fenceline communities are so skeptical of the solutions you were working on. How did you navigate that tension?
Well, one thing is, I know what I don’t know, and I’m usually pretty willing to say what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. In the early days, I knew that this was going to be a challenge for our office and so I recruited a social scientist: Holly Jean Buck, she’s a professor at the University of Buffalo. We brought Holly in to help us develop some of the language around … it started off with community benefits, but some of our investments don’t always lead to benefits, so let’s be honest, right? And so what we wanted to think about is, what are the societal considerations and impacts of our investments? We ended up recruiting a few others, and now we have a team that’s focused on domestic engagement, and also communications and outreach.
What do you think it could mean for some of what you’ve accomplished and other things you’ve set in motion if Biden is not reelected?
I feel pretty good about what we’ve put in place, that it’s sustainable. The other thing about what I saw is that industry is really leaning in on doing these things. The low-carbon supply chains — a lot of glassmakers, cement facilities — are very interested in improving energy efficiency, are interested in carbon capture or using hydrogen as a heat source. And so what we have done is really looking at making sure they’re economic. All of these efforts that we’ve put in place are extremely bipartisan, and they’re essentially just supporting industry in a way such that they’re achievable because they’re economic.
Let’s talk a little bit about what’s next. Why did you want to work with Isometric? What are you going to be doing there?
When I was at DOE, from the beginning, we were looking at, you know, there’s a lot of the carbon removal portfolio where we don’t have the rigor in place to be able to determine the durability of the removals, the additionality of them, the time scale on which the carbon is actually removed, quantifying net removed. And so we started a commercialization effort, leveraging our national labs to help us to develop the framework. Isometric is working toward establishing rigorous frameworks, and I’m hoping to leverage the efforts ongoing at DOE — and with transparency, so that others may follow, which could lead to more durable removals and greater impact at the end of the day.
What about on the academic side of your career. Where do you plan to focus your research?
Some of the work that we were doing, or the team has been continuing to do while I’m at DOE, is mineralization, looking at different waste feedstocks that have alkalinity [a property that’s useful for carbon removal], like magnesium and calcium. One of the things that we’re going to focus a little bit more on is asking the question of, what else is there? You know, if there’s rare earth elements or critical minerals that could be used for clean energy technologies, EV motors, magnets for wind turbines. And so, I’m really excited about looking at these materials and seeing what value is there.
I’m also really excited about helping with the measurement and quantification of some of the more natural systems of removal, like forests. One of the new majors at Penn is artificial intelligence. I think there’s an opportunity right now to think about, how can we take data, whether it’s from drones or whether it’s from Lidar and airplanes or satellite data, bringing it together in an integrated way again, so that we have more robust databases that are also transparent.
There’s so many debates going on around carbon removal right now, and it feels like they often come down to philosophical differences. Are these debates important? Or do we just need to decide what we’re going to do and then reevaluate it later?
We’re not in a position anymore to think we can just decarbonize and not do greenhouse gas removals. We know we need to do both. And so I think that there are some kind of “no regrets” things that we can do — opportunities, as we’re scaling up both in the near term, to think about them in a coordinated way. In communities that don’t have solar today, imagine you have a direct air capture facility going in, and then they’re bringing clean energy that they’re using for direct air capture, but they’re bringing it for the first time ever to a community that wouldn’t otherwise have access.
But it really is regional. I think it’s regional in that there’s limited resources in any given region, whether it’s low-carbon energy, land, clean water, even geologic pore space. You have it in some states and not others. And so we really need to look at those resources and always prioritize decarbonizing, but recognize that it’s not necessarily one or the other.
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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.