Trump administration restores environmental grants, but advocates remain worried

Federally funded environmental projects in Massachusetts once again have access to hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that the Trump administration had frozen earlier this month.

The grant money was restored this week following a lawsuit over their suspension filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and attorneys general from 21 states and the District of Columbia. The judge in that case ruled last week that the Trump administration was improperly freezing these and other federal funds, despite a restraining order issued in January.

The unfrozen funds include $156 million for Massachusetts to expand access to solar power, over $100 million for cities to buy electric school buses, smaller grants for local environmental justice nonprofits to plan for the impacts of climate change, and a range of other environmental projects across the state.

In a court filing in the case challenging the suspensions, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bonnie Heiple said nine frozen grants totaling $74.9 million that were authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, “support critical environmental protection and public health work ranging from clean air to clean drinking water to clean land.”

“While MassDEP would strive to seek replacement funding for the important programs supported by these federal grants, replacing this magnitude of funds would be virtually impossible, particularly with the required expediency given that much work is already underway or critical to perform immediately,” Heiple wrote.

In an email to GBH News on Friday, a spokesperson for the EPA wrote, “EPA worked expeditiously to enable payment accounts for IIJA and IRA grant recipients, so funding is now accessible to all recipients.”

Despite that news, many environmental advocates remain worried.

“Will they be frozen again? What’s going to happen next? To be determined,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, an organization made up of former EPA staffers that was formed in response to the environmental policies of the first Trump presidency.

“Many of these grants have been frozen and unfrozen and frozen again multiple times in just the last few weeks,” Roos said. “Sometimes there’s like less than 24 hours where they have access to their funding. My hope, of course, is that this is the end of all that nonsense, since they continue to lose in the courts on this. But I don’t know.”

The EPA is among federal agencies being targeted for staff reductions by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Nearly 400 probationary employees were laid off from the EPA last week and 170 EPA workers focused on environmental justice issues were placed on administrative leave .

“I mean, this is how you decimate an entire agency,” Roos said. “It’s a combo platter of making things super confusing and freezing things and unfreezing things, and prohibiting people, and giving verbal direction, and sending out memos and rescinding memos. And then you create a situation where you terminate the newest folks and then you create the 'fork in the road’ [resignation plan] to incentivize folks that are close to retirement to leave. And then it will take years to rebuild any semblance of a functioning agency. And the implications of that are that we don’t breathe clean air and we don’t drink clean water.”

The layoffs and uncertainty around grants will have a significant impact on environmental projects in the region, said David Cash, the former director of the EPA regional office in Boston overseeing New England.

“What we’re seeing here in New England is lots of frustration,” Cash said. “States that have aggressive climate goals, that are invested in environmental justice, that had a Congress and an administration that was supporting them, bringing clean air and clean water to communities all over New England, are being stymied in that, and are creating huge uncertainty.”

And that will have ripple effects well beyond the EPA, Cash said.

When funding is “on again, off again, on again,” Cash said it can wreak economic havoc. An HVAC company that installs heat pumps, for example, wouldn’t know if it should be hiring or not.

“Who’s going to hire people in a situation where the federal government can’t be trusted? Right?” he said. “That’s the fundamental problem with what’s going on. In addition to the fear that they’ll freeze the money next week or they’ll cancel it all.”

The news of EPA layoffs has been particularly painful for Denny Dart, who worked in enforcement for the agency until her retirement in 2023. Now with a smaller staff, Dart said, it will be difficult for the EPA to do all the work it is asked to do by Congress.

“Even at the point when I retired two years ago, we did not have adequate staff to cover the many statutes and the large geographic area that we were required to cover,” she said. “You know, DOGE talks about efficiency. That is what we worked on every day in management, how to be more efficient because we had too few people and too much work.”

Dart said she’s found it troubling to hear EPA staff referred to as the “deep state.”

“The only thing deep about the people who work for EPA is deep expertise and deep commitment to protecting public health and the environment,” Dart said. “The people who I hired over the years were highly qualified, very well-educated engineers, scientists and data analysts. And they’re not easy to hire. I’ll be honest. And so it’s devastating to see that a whole new generation of employees have been told they’re let go. The public needs these people to do the job of protecting their water quality, their drinking water, their air quality. And cleaning up Superfund sites. There are so many important and very technically difficult tasks that these people take on.”

And, Dart added, those employees chose to work for the EPA despite the fact that they could have earned more working in the private sector.