Kipnuk, Alaska, received a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity early this year: a $20 million federal grant to stop the erosion that threatens its future.
Leaders of the isolated village got to work, purchasing a bulldozer and making plans to build a rock wall that would prevent its homes from falling into a river.
But in May, the Trump administration terminated Kipnuk’s grant, along with hundreds of others that President Joe Biden’s agencies had issued under the Inflation Reduction Act. Now the village leaders are scrambling for ways to replace the cash — while other recipients of the rescinded grants question whether they can ever trust the federal government’s promises again.
“My mind was like, how could they terminate the grant, even when we did not do anything wrong?” Rayna Paul, the village’s environmental director, said in a recent interview as a storm that garnered a flood warning from the National Weather Service bore down.
In Mississippi, the founder of an environmental nonprofit whose grants totaling more than $20 million vanished under the Trump rollback said she’s done seeking help from Washington.
“Right now, definitely, I am not looking into any federal grants. The risk is way too high and the effort is way too large,” said Dominika Parry, whose group 2°C Mississippi is based outside the state capital of Jackson. “And also, as an environmental organization, we really do not feel welcome.”
Those grant withdrawals are the fallout from President Donald Trump’s effort to erase Biden’s climate legacy. And as they derail the plans of municipal governments and small nonprofits from the Deep South to the edge of the Bering Sea, the lasting impact could be to make it difficult for any future Democratic administration to find eager recipients for any similarly ambitious climate initiatives.
Despite EPA’s turnabout, Paul said the dire situation for Kipnuk and its population of a few hundred residents meant that she has little choice but to continue seeking federal aid to save the village, along with help from any other possible source. Despite months of searching, though, she has no prospects that can come close to replacing the lost grant.
Sheryl Musgrove, director of the climate justice program at the Alaska Institute for Justice, which helps Alaska Native tribes attract resources for climate adaptation work such as the Kipnuk grant, said there’s a new level of uncertainty when it comes to applying for federal grants.
“I do just wonder, the back of my mind is always, like, is it really worth applying for this? Is this [grant] going to be another one that that’s going to be jerked out from under one of the tribes?” Musgrove said.
Applying for federal grants requires a notoriously significant time and resource commitment for applicants — which drives up the expense and makes smaller groups less likely to apply. The IRA, however, offered awards that could cover the costs for major projects on its own, meaning the recipients could avoid having to cobble together several smaller grants from less deep-pocketed sources like states or philanthropies.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has attacked the Biden program, saying the hundreds of grants ended by EPA were “wasteful federal spending,” in a statement at the time. “It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars,” he said.
Litigation over EPA’s terminations is ongoing, but federal courts are increasingly siding with the Trump administration. And even if the groups seeking to restore their grants are successful, it will come at a considerable cost in both time and money.
Parry’s group in Mississippi received two grants from EPA under the IRA that were terminated this spring: A $500,000 award to support an ongoing project to convert dilapidated properties into “microparks” and reduce flooding issues, and a $20 million grant to fund a “resiliency hub” in a converted building to provide shelter during hurricanes and other extreme weather. The site would have included a solar-powered microgrid and an independent water well with the beds and resources to host 150 people.
The smaller microparks project will move forward in a more “simplistic” form with private funding, Parry said. But the resiliency hub is dead in the water.
Parry’s group spent 10 months working with EPA on its grant application, with the Biden administration providing technical assistance she said helped them navigate the labyrinthine process. EPA also connected her with other organizations in the region with whom they could collaborate in order to save money, such as by making bulk solar panel purchases at a reduced per-unit price.
“All of that all of a sudden got cut off,” Parry said.
The loss of the grants hobbled 2°C Mississippi, which was already a small outfit. Parry has started working for free, and another full-time employee left the group over funding concerns. 2CM is now down to one part-time employee and a part-time accountant, whose hours combined don’t add up to a full-time employee, Parry said.
Another group second-guessing the stability of federal money is the Building Materials Reuse Association.
Brad Guy, a project manager with the group, has spent decades securing grants, and was typically “thrilled” when he previously landed awards totaling just $50,000. So the IRA grant his group secured from EPA totaling $6.7 million was a “once-in-a-lifetime” chance.
“You’d never had that kind of opportunity,” he said. “You’d never have it in the private sector. There’s no philanthropy that has that kind of resource.”
Build Reuse, as the group is known, would have passed that money through to more than a hundred sub-recipients over five years to develop information about the lower carbon footprint of salvaged construction materials, informing new strategies into how to reduce emissions from the construction sector.
Guy said he has worked with EPA via smaller grants before. “It’s typically been the most stable and sound and best partnership you could ask for.”
But the Trump administration’s abrupt termination and lack of communication has made him second-guess his relationship with EPA. “Why would you work with anyone who can’t honor their commitments or even communicate?”
Without any federal money, Build Reuse’s path forward is uncertain. Two workers who had been hired for the grant-funded program were laid off, and plans to hire two more were shelved. Guy himself said he started working for free, and he doesn’t know how long he can do that.
“That’s to keep the momentum going, the continuity, try to raise more money,” he said.
But he said he won’t get close to replacing the funds for such a large and complex project from other sources, he admitted. “That’s the story of nonprofits, you spend half the time struggling to keep the lights on.”
Not every jilted grant recipient is in as dire straits. Larger nonprofits that are tapped into multiple other funding streams are better able to weather the grant terminations, even though they will be scaling back grand plans.
GRID Alternatives, a California nonprofit with a staff of around 500 that got over $300 million under EPA’s $7 billion “Solar for All” program, saw its grants terminated in August when EPA canceled that program. That money would have expanded the work the group has been doing since it was founded almost 25 years ago: funding solar projects on low-income housing and tribal lands.
The money would have allowed GRID Alternatives to expand its operations into more states. Erica Mackie, the group’s cofounder, said they’re looking into replacement funding possibilities, including private foundations, local governments and even corporate sponsors. But those won’t provide the same opportunity to scale up solar deployment like the federal money did.
“Once you dream it, it’s hard to put it back in the bottle,” Mackie said.
The EPA grant was also important because it was easier for GRID Alternatives to target it where the group wanted. Money from other sources typically comes with strings that restrict how or where it is spent. The EPA money was more “regionally agnostic,” Mackie said.
Despite losing the grant, Mackie said she wouldn’t do anything differently.
“We’re in a really interesting moment in time where it’s hard to predict what there will be funding for and what there won’t be funding for,” she said. “But I think we really still want to, on behalf of our communities, go after every opportunity there is to make energy more affordable and cleaner in everybody’s neighborhood.”
Not every group is sure they’ll be around for future funding opportunities.
Parry was recently informed by The Hartford, the Connecticut-based insurance company that provides it with basic general liability coverage, that it will not renew its insurance because it was ending its work with environmental groups.
The Hartford earlier this year similarly canceled the insurance for the Southern Adirondack Audubon Society, saying that environmental and other advocacy groups have “an increased risk profile that falls outside of our Small Business unit’s risk appetite.”
Company spokesperson Saverio Mancini said in a statement that “The Hartford’s underwriting decisions are based on an assessment of risk and are not informed by political and social viewpoints of any persuasion.”
The insurance simply covers accidental injuries around the office, Parry said. “We are as low risk as it gets.” But she argued it’s evidence of a “systemic” trend of private sectors being wary of working with environmental groups in the current political climate.
“So what does this mean for our mission and for all the other organizations?” she said. “I have no idea. Nothing good.”
And in Kipnuk, the riverbank continues to erode ever closer to the village.
Paul said that she searched for other funding sources because of long delays dealing with the state. But with the EPA grant terminated, there’s no clear replacement.
Other federal funding sources like the Denali Commission and Bureau of Indian Affairs haven’t put out their usual funding notices this year, Paul said. She’s written letters to the Army Corps of Engineers and not heard back. And philanthropic opportunities give little time to apply and can’t cover anywhere near the necessary amount.
Meanwhile, the river is getting closer by up to 12 feet per year, with erosion starting to encroach on the infrastructure used by ships to offload critical fuel for the village’s generators, vehicles and boats.
“They’re on their homelands,” said the Alaska Institute for Justice’s Musgrove. “They want to stay there but they may have no choice — if they don’t get funding to protect themselves from erosion — but to potentially relocate. And the problem is there’s no funding available to relocate, either.”
