Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said earlier this week that he had canceled more than 400 grants “across nine unnecessary programs.”
What were those unnecessary programs? Why were they deemed unnecessary? The Trump administration refuses to say.
This is the fourth round of grant cancellations that Zeldin, working “hand-in-hand” with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, has announced, which together will “save” the American people more than $1.9 billion in funds. After contacting the EPA four times over the course of a week for more information on the grants in question and getting no response at all, the agency finally instructed me to “refer to the March 10 announcement,” which doesn’t contain any additional details about which grants were canceled, “and to the Department of Government Efficiency’s webpage for additional updates.”
The efficiency department website has not yet been updated to reflect the more than 400 grants that were canceled on Monday. The previous rounds of cancellations are listed by date and amount, but there is no information about which programs the funds were from or whether they were already under contract.
“The claims of these grants being unnecessary, or wasteful, or saving American taxpayers funding, in my mind, is complete misinformation,” David Cash, the former EPA regional administrator for New England under the Biden administration, told me. “These grants were created because of statutes passed by Congress.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act gave the EPA more than $100 billion to spend across more than 70 programs. By the end of last year, about 88% of appropriated funds had been awarded to cities, states, tribes, researchers, nonprofits, and companies. “The EPA was given both the authority and the requirement to invest federal taxpayer dollars into projects that are going to bring down energy costs for families, grow clean energy jobs, make the air cleaner for communities,” said Cash. “The real savings are in energy costs that families would have been able to benefit from.”
Zeldin’s announcements are an escalation of President Trump’s “freeze” and review of funding for climate change and DEI-related programs. Despite a federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on the freeze in February, followed by a preliminary injunction last week, the administration has continued to lock out grant recipients from the government’s payment system, and now, apparently, cancel grants altogether with no explanation. In refusing to comply with the court’s orders, Trump is teeing up a Supreme Court challenge to the Impoundment Control Act, a 50-year-old law that says the president can’t revoke funds without requesting permission from Congress.
Without knowing which grants Zeldin is trying to cancel, we can’t know for sure whether they would have helped consumers save money, created jobs, or produced cleaner air. But Zeldin appears to be scrubbing that last goal — arguably the entire purpose of the EPA — from the agency’s mission statement. On Wednesday, he announced a plan to “reconsider” dozens of environmental rules in “the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” Since its inception, the EPA’s mission has been to “protect human health and the environment;” Zeldin, by contrast, said his priorities were to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”
After scouring a social media-like feed on the efficiency department homepage, I found information on just two of the targeted grants:
- A $3.2 million grant to a consulting firm to “develop a reporting system to collect data on Justice40, the EJ scorecard, and other EJECR reporting asks,” referring to two initiatives launched by the Biden administration to track where the benefits of clean energy are going, and to the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which Zeldin now plans to shutter.
- A $4 million grant to provide materials “to increase workforce diversity in the construction materials sector.”
Cash questioned the logic of canceling an effort to track spending. “That makes for efficient government. We should know where we’re spending our money and the impact that it’s having,” he said. “And shouldn’t we want to be investing in those areas that have suffered the highest asthma rates or have had a history of water pollution? Why wouldn’t we want to invest in those communities?”
The sudden cancellation of billions of dollars in government funding with no disclosure as to what the money was earmarked for is in stark contrast to President Trump’s pledge to have “the most transparent Administration in history,” as well as the EPA’s assertion that it “is committed to accountability and transparency for the American people.”
The grant cancellations come on top of Zeldin’s much-publicized termination of the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created by Congress to set up nonprofit lending authorities that would finance clean energy projects around the country. Zeldin claims to have “identified material deficiencies which pose an unacceptable risk to the lawful execution of these grants,” but has given no explanation as to what those deficiencies are. The closest thing to a suggestion of impropriety has been the fact that the money was being managed by an outside institution, an arrangement that the federal government has used to disburse funds for decades, including under the previous Trump administration.
In a letter to the Department of Justice and FBI on Tuesday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island requested evidence predicating a criminal investigation of the GGRF. He accused the Trump administration of “purposefully misusing the tools of law enforcement, and pursuing false allegations of criminal conduct, with the improper purpose to wrongfully freeze assets appropriated by Congress and obligated to designated recipients.”
Whitehouse held a hearing on Trump’s funding freeze on Wednesday, during which he accused Trump and Musk of “stealing from the American people to pay for tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy” and deeming this “gangster government.”
During the hearing, Caley Edgerly, the president and CEO of a bus dealership in Virginia, described the “chaos” caused by a freeze on grants for electric school buses. His company ordered 48 buses for five school districts that had been awarded funding. He’s worried about interest on those orders piling up, his ability to make payroll, and being left holding the bag. He’s also worried about the impact on manufacturers, who have invested in the materials, batteries, transmissions, and inverters to deliver on these electric bus orders. “The entire industry, all school bus manufacturers, by my estimation, has about a billion dollars invested in these materials,” he said. “They’re sitting on the shelf.” On top of that, he said, the local utility, Dominion, has spent about a million dollars on chargers for the school districts to charge the buses.
It’s unclear whether the electric bus grants that Edgerly discussed are among those Zeldin is attempting to cancel.
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