By Anna Kramer and Nuha Dolby, NOTUS
States across the country are unable to access hundreds of millions of federal dollars for energy upgrades, disaster resilience, infrastructure and environmental cleanup, officials told NOTUS.
President Donald Trump has pledged to undo the last administration’s justice and equity policies, which are deeply embedded in the money states get for energy and environmental programs. The continued blockade reflects a month of deep uncertainty over how far Trump can go to undo existing agreements in order to meet that promise.
The Trump administration is keeping states and local governments from accessing billions of approved and granted dollars for a wide swath of federal funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act. A federal circuit-court judge on Jan. 31 ordered the administration to release the frozen funds, and then did so again in a clarifying enforcement order on Feb. 10, but state officials in Alaska, Arizona and Pennsylvania told NOTUS that the administration has still not released them.
Trump’s executive orders and memos from the Office of Management and Budget have called for a rescission of all “Green New Deal” funding, even though the “Green New Deal” does not exist in law. The Biden administration focused on environmental justice and equity in its design of energy and environmental grant programs — policy goals of “Green New Deal” legislation proposed by progressives in Congress. The Biden administration called its efforts the “Justice40” initiative, which required that 40% of all benefits from clean energy programs go to disadvantaged communities.
Many states draw a significant portion of their funding from the federal government, and their plans and budgets each year assume that already granted and contracted funding will continue to arrive predictably and on schedule. Now with much of the money for energy, infrastructure and environmental cleanup missing, state and local governments are faced with hard decisions about whether and how to renege on contracts and continue promised programs.
Officials from Arizona, which is among the states that received the most federal funds from these programs, told NOTUS the state was still unable to access its federal grant money as of Tuesday. Arizona is facing multiple compounding energy and resource crises, with heat-related deaths increasing tenfold in the state over the last 20 years, energy bills spiking and water scarcity worsening. The state government only had one employee focused on energy resiliency two years ago, but with IRA and IIJA funds that number has grown to about 12.
Arizona was preparing to award federal dollars to modernize and harden its electric grid and for local governments to improve energy efficiency just before the Trump administration began the funding freeze, said Blaise Caudill, the deputy director of the state’s office of resiliency.
Neighboring New Mexico shares a similar set of dilemmas, although New Mexico’s energy office couldn’t confirm whether all grants were frozen because the status of each one often changed day by day, and sometimes hour by hour.
“We have eight or nine other grant programs totaling up to about a quarter-billion dollars,” said Rebecca Stair, the director of New Mexico’s energy conservation and management division. “They range everything from solar-for-all, which is residential solar for low-income folk, all the way to a grid-modernization program that is looking to fix rotten poles and sagging wires, so we don’t create another wildfire. That program is in the same uncertain pickle.”
Approximately 80 groups in 44 states have contacted the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government to request help because they’ve been locked out of their reimbursement accounts over the last few weeks, the nonprofit said in a Wednesday press release.
The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to request for comment on the funding freeze.
NOTUS analyzed what federal data is still available to identify the grants and projects tagged with equity and environmental justice that would make the most obvious targets for attempts to claw back funding under Trump’s executive orders.
There is virtually no part of the country and no energy or environmental program untouched by the environmental justice lens, the analysis found. Billions of dollars for projects in Republican-majority states and swing states met Justice40 requirements or somehow addressed “environmental justice” because they were aimed toward low-income, coal or rural communities, in addition to tribal nations.
Congress authorized approximately $8 billion through the Department of Energy for home energy and appliance rebates, which the Biden administration said would advance Justice40. The rebates are intended to help people afford up-front costs for home upgrades that would lower energy costs over time.
Every state except South Dakota has enrolled in the rebate program. Texas and Florida are two of the five largest recipient states, with Texas due the most at about $690 million.
Arizona’s share for the rebate program amounts to about $153 million, and it began rolling out late last year. But that money isn’t just sitting in a state bank account — normally, Arizona officials file invoices for the cost of the rebates, with the expectation that the federal government would reimburse the state within two days.
One recent invoice for $37,000 in heat pumps is now weeks overdue, Caudill said.
The DOE has deleted its web page dedicated to explaining the rebates program. New Mexico, Georgia and Maine are among the many states that link to the DOE’s information on their websites for residents; those links now redirect to the department’s home page.
Arizona hasn’t received confirmation emails for the regular reporting it submits to the government on all of its programs, and most of the office of energy resiliency’s regular check-in meetings with the federal-grant-program officers have been indefinitely postponed.
“We are really worried about providing assistance to Arizona households who are struggling to make ends meet and trying to reduce their energy bills. The rebates are really key to that,” Caudill said.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego said her city’s residents struggle in the increasingly hot summers. “People are trying to lower energy bills for our residents. It just feels like lowering energy costs ought to be an area where we can all agree,” she told NOTUS.
NOTUS found hundreds of other federal awards that are labeled as equity or environmental-justice focused in red states and swing states, including at least 292 just through the Environmental Protection Agency. Of the awards that NOTUS was able to identify using the available data, those that explicitly use the term “environmental justice” in the project description or in the grant award name totalled to just under $2.3 billion.
Those grants include about $50 million to Houston, Texas, for local cleanups, disaster resiliency and air quality and asthma projects; hundreds of millions to remove drinking water contaminants, including nearly $115 million for Texas, $25 million to Alabama and $58 million to Georgia; and just under $20 million for Dillard University in Louisiana to upgrade its ventilation and energy systems and to build disaster-resiliency centers in the New Orleans area.
Environmental and energy grants targeted to diversity or equity stretch across government. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, housed within the Department of Commerce, disbursed at least 110 awards with a tagged award goal of “equity” to projects that were housed in or impacted red and swing states. Those awards totalled to around $757 million and included $74 million to Alaska tribes for climate adaptation and $56 million to the United Houma Nation — which is located along the southeast coast of Louisiana — to upgrade evacuation and communications infrastructure for natural disasters.
That equity tag, initially viewed by NOTUS in early February, has since disappeared from the website’s BIL-IRA award explorer.
Pennsylvania’s abandoned-mine-cleanup grant, which is $244 million a year, also remains frozen. Like the home-energy-rebates program, the Biden administration touted the award as a Justice40 achievement, because former coal mine sites are usually situated in low-income areas.
The state filed a suit last week alleging that the Trump administration is withholding access to the funds.
Despite regular efforts to communicate with the government, state and local leaders know very little about what the administration plans to do next.
When asked whether New Mexico would stop offering the grants it has been awarded until there was more clarity, Stair would not commit either way. “We’re tied in knots. And it’s really difficult to know. There’s the right thing to do, and then there’s the funded thing to do, or the clear thing to do. And those are not the same right now.”
Gallego said that Phoenix can access some of its portals, but that federal partners are afraid to share what’s coming next. “As we talk to federal agencies about our Inflation Reduction Act programs, the regional offices are really unsure about what they can say to us,” she said.
“They are just feeling like they need to pause and wait for guidance from Washington, D.C. Both my team and our regional partners in the federal government have struggled to understand the executive orders and what they mean.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS. Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between Verite News and NOTUS — a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
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