Overview:
A legal battle over $2.8 billion in environmental justice grants has left projects serving Black and brown communities in limbo — and with the program’s spending deadline approaching, the clock is running out.
In the early days of the Trump 2.0 administration, as federal departments slashed programs under DOGE, the Environmental Protection Agency turned its eye to the $2.8 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program as a potential target for budget cuts.
Funded under former President Joe Biden through the Inflation Reduction Act, the program was intended to help under-resourced communities on the front lines of climate change. The Trump-era EPA quickly cut the block grant program entirely.
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Then, when it shut down the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the EPA fired all staff members who managed the grants. Environmental groups sued.
We had all these plans to do all these great things. Then they pulled the rug out from under us.
Christian Wells, University of South Florida
Since then, the EPA has claimed it couldn’t revive what, in essence, would be a brand-new and fully funded office and program.
“We had all these plans to do all these great things,” Christian Wells, the director of the Center for Brownfields Research and Redevelopment at the University of South Florida, told Inside Climate News about the $15 million EPA grant awarded to help address runoff pollution in Tampa’s University Area, a historically Black neighborhood. “Then they pulled the rug out from under us.”
‘Arbritrary, Capricious, Unlawful’
As the lawsuit works its way through the courts, the lack of staff to administer the grants has become central to the Trump administration’s argument that it can’t revive the program. The courts, however, have been divided on how they view the issue.
In June and July, a federal district judge issued a pair of rulings declaring the block grants illegally canceled and ordering their reinstatement. But a divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling on Aug. 20.
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, an Obama appointee, issued the first two rulings. He wrote in June that EPA’s “internal guidance terminating the ECJ program…was arbitrary and capricious and unlawful.”
But the judge also initially sided with the agency on reinstating the grants, saying that doing so would require rehiring staff, which he found “impractical.”
Then in July, Gergel ordered that the EPA “must comply with its statutory obligations” to administer the program through the end of September, as required under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Running Out of Time
Lawmakers baked money into the program when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, under Biden. Administering the block grant program was one of the first tasks for the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which the Biden Administration started that same year.
But after the July ruling, the agency argued in a court document that bringing the program back would require “a tremendous diversion” of its resources.
The EPA successfully sought a stay from the 4th Circuit to halt the lower court’s order reinstating the grants through September. Now, the grant program remains on hold while the EPA continues its appeal.
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The EPA picked 105 environmental and climate justice-related projects to fund. The grants totaled around $1.6 billion, leaving $1.2 billion to spend on making the climate crisis easier for Black and brown people.
With the grants set to expire at the end of September and the legal case still moving through appeals, little time remains to pay out more money for climate justice projects.
