By the time Biden stepped into the White House four years later, many of these communities had climate plans either in place or in progress. When his administration passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, setting aside billions of dollars for emissions reduction and climate adaptation projects, they were in a prime position to apply for funding. By November 2024, with most of that money doled out, it was easy to imagine how climate-forward cities could forge ahead, seeded by grants, regardless of what Trump did.
Except then Trump did the thing that many assumed he would not — because he legally could not — do. He froze and is now trying to claw back congressionally appropriated, contractually obligated funds. And in so doing, he has thrown the prospects for cities as a last line of defense into question.
“In this administration, it’s a lot more chaotic,” Barbara Buffaloe, the mayor of Columbia, Missouri, told me. “There’s a lot more happening than I feel like there was in 2017, right at the get-go. Nobody knows what the universe is right now.”
Columbia was among those that joined the “still in” campaign in 2017. It adopted emissions reduction goals in 2018, and passed a climate action and adaptation plan in 2019. The Biden administration awarded the city more than $28 million across three separate federal grants to build electric vehicle charging stations, make electrical upgrades that would allow it to charge electric buses, and redesign its central business loop to be more walkable, bikeable, and safe.
All three of those grants are now up in the air. Buffaloe said she was told by state partners that the $2.1 million business loop planning grant from the Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities program was paused. Columbia was the only city in Missouri to get a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant from the DOT, with the $3.6 million supposed to help pay for EV chargers at the library and the airport. The city is moving ahead with initial activities like environmental reviews and preliminary engineering in the hope that funds to build the actual stations will be unfrozen by the time it’s ready to break ground. Regarding the $23 million bus infrastructure grant, part of a separate DOT program, she said the city hasn’t heard from its grant managers in about a month.
“We don’t know whether or not to continue on the projects,” she told me. “It’s that feeling of uncertainty and trepidation that is causing us the most anxiety. Our construction window is not year-round in Columbia, and because we’re a public institution, it takes a lot longer for us to put out bids and to start projects. We need to know if we have this budget or not.”
It’s not just the funding freeze leaving Columbia in a holding pattern. The city has a municipally-owned electric utility that had been looking to take advantage of “direct pay,” an option for nonprofit entities with no tax liability to collect federal renewable energy incentives as direct subsidies, to help it build more solar farms. But now Republicans in Congress are considering eliminating direct pay.
The funding freeze has put a lot of cities in this position where time-sensitive decisions are stalled. Hundreds of communities were awarded grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture program to fund tree-planting for carbon mitigation and shade creation, for example. Some recipients have been told their grants were canceled altogether, others are still in the dark — their federal grant managers have been fired and no one is responding to their emails.
“They’re kind of at this point of, hey, do we put in the order for trees? We need to plant at certain times of the year,” Laura Jay, the deputy director of Climate Mayors, a national network of mayors working to address climate change, told me. “For a lot of these cities and programs, there’s key decisions that they have to be making, and when there’s uncertainty around it, it puts the city at a huge risk.” There’s financial risk, she said, in terms of spending money without knowing if it will get reimbursed, but also planning risks. A number of cities were awarded grants to purchase electric school buses, for example, and they need to make sure they are going to have enough to get kids to school.
As a larger, wealthier city, Columbia is in a better position than others. It collects revenue through a capital improvement tax that Buffaloe said could be used for climate projects. “We’ll do as much as we can,” she told me.
But in more rural areas, these grants represented a rare opportunity to modernize and build more equitable access to infrastructure.
“We’re in Southeast Ohio, which traditionally has been left behind when it comes to larger infrastructure projects,” Andrew Chiki, the deputy service-safety director in Athens, Ohio, told me. “We don’t have an interstate highway.”
Chiki helped lead a regional effort to apply for a Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant, the same program Columbia won funding from that is now frozen. He and his partners were awarded $12.5 million to build a corridor of electric vehicle chargers in 16 communities between Athens and Dayton. “One of our attempts with this was to answer the question, if EV adoption takes off the way that we are envisioning, how do we allow an on-ramp for communities that are already disadvantaged to be able to adopt?”
Chiki said they were still waiting to hear whether they could move forward with the project or not. Athens passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency in 2020, and adopted a target to reduce emissions by 50% over 10 years. The city has made some strides, Chiki said, by making buildings more energy efficient and installing solar on city-owned facilities. “We are still committed to doing as much as we can,” he told me.
But if the EV charging grant falls through, the smaller villages and towns between Athens and Dayton that don’t have the staff resources or capacity to apply for these types of grants will lose out, he said. “We would probably look at other types of funding sources, but it would make it incredibly difficult and not be nearly as broad as we want.”
There are some pots of money for local climate projects that have flown under the Trump administration’s radar. Last year, the South Florida ClimateReady Tech Hub, a consortium of local governments, schools, labor groups, and companies working to accelerate the development of climate technologies, won a $19.5 million grant from the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. The money came from the Biden-era CHIPS and Science Act, a law that Trump is pushing Congress to scrap but that Republicans have thus far defended. Tech Hub will use the funds to scale low-emissions cement that can be used for adaptation projects, energy efficiency, and workforce development, among other things.
Francesca Covey, the chief innovation and economic development officer for Miami-Dade County and regional innovation officer for the Tech Hub, told me the group has continued to have quarterly check-ins with federal partners and haven’t gotten any signal that the funding is in jeopardy. “It’s really been more business as usual,” she said. Covey also mentioned two pilot projects to build artificial reefs and seawalls in the area that had funding from the Department of Defense and were moving forward.
Still, the Tech Hub has adjusted its language to stay competitive in the new political environment. The group changed its name to the Risk and Resilience Tech Hub two weeks ago, Covey told me. “We wanted to underscore the economic imperative of the work,” she said, when I asked what motivated the name change. “Right now we’re finding that where we are getting the best traction with the private and public community is around risk. We wanted to make sure we were couching it in the right way.”
Ithaca, New York, on the other hand, which passed its own Green New Deal in 2019, is committed to its climate and equity-centric messaging. “We are not intending to change the narrative around what we’re doing,” Rebecca Evans, the city’s sustainability director, told me. “It’s still clean energy, and it is still because climate change is a threat to human existence. We are still going to prioritize black and brown populations and populations that experience poverty at various levels because they are most vulnerable to climate change.”
About 85% of Evans’ Green New Deal budget comes from federal sources, and at first she worried that was all at risk. In 2022 and 2023, Ithaca had received funding from what’s called “congressional directed spending,” or “earmarks,” in two federal appropriations bills, meaning that New York state lawmakers fought to get money set aside for the city. The first grant, worth $1 million, was for a hydrogen production and fueling project. The second, worth $1.5 million, was for a wide-ranging program to decarbonize the school system and enhance a local workforce development program to include new energy efficiency certifications. Both programs included explicit diversity, equity, and inclusion-related objectives, so Evans assumed they would be targeted by the Trump administration.
But on Tuesday, she was told by federal partners on the hydrogen grant that congressionally directed spending was not subject to Trump’s executive orders and got the greenlight to move into the next phase. Evans still hasn’t heard back from her federal partners on the second grant, but she’s more hopeful now that it will move forward.
Back when I first spoke to Evans, when things were more up in the air, she told me she worried that the Trump administration’s actions would cause advocates to lose hope. “I think anger can be a positive thing, but it’s the loss of hope, even if it’s marginal, that is truly, truly dangerous to this movement.”
Perhaps that’s why Evans, like all of the other local leaders I spoke with, projected optimism when I asked what they could accomplish over the next four years without federal support. She was already trying to find the money elsewhere, she said. “We can’t do all of the amazing things that we wanted to do, but we can still make progress,” she said.
“Cities are incredibly nimble and innovative,” Jay, of Climate Mayors, told me. “I think that they’re eager to and committed to keeping the work going. What that looks like, I think, is hard to figure out right now, because everyone’s kind of caught in the chaos of trying to figure out if they still have this funding or not. But they’re fully committed to making sure that this work is continuing.”
The Park Fire burns in California.
