Trump Country Feeling Pain of Environmental Justice Grant Cuts

In February the skies opened over southwestern Virginia, dumping seven inches of rain in a torrent that washed out roads, destroyed homes and businesses, and prompted Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to declare a state of emergency.

It was nothing new for the tiny community of Pound, 40 miles north of the Tennessee border. The town has flooded three times in the last three years, partly because it sits in a valley and partly because it’s ringed by rivers and streams that swell every time it rains.

That’s why the residents of Pound were so glad to be included in a $500,000 federal grant in 2023 to help fix the problem. The Environmental Protection Agency awarded the Environmental Justice (EJ) Collaborative Problem-Solving grant to the nonprofit group Appalachian Voices, which then planned to split it among five coal communities—one of which was Pound—to solve environmental problems.

Local officials quickly got to work on a flood mitigation plan, including building a riverwalk that could absorb excess water and introducing native plant species to slow riverbank erosion. But then, just days after the February floodwaters receded, came the news: the Trump administration had revoked the grant.

“It’s one of those things where you feel your stomach drop,” said Leabern Kennedy, Pound’s vice mayor. “It was, ‘Where do we go from here?’”

In its Feb. 21 termination letter, the EPA said it must ensure its grants don’t support programs or organizations that “promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, ‘environmental justice’ initiatives, and conflict with the agency’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence.”

That rationale is consistent with an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Jan. 21, announcing the ending of “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The document revoked a Clinton-era executive order that’s widely considered the founding document for federal EJ efforts.

All told, the EPA under Trump has canceled about 350 EJ grants worth some $2.4 billion in already allocated funding, according to Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization. Congress had appropriated another $560 million that hasn’t yet gone out.

The grants affect communities of color as well as those that are overwhelmingly White—in blue states and red—across the country. Several environmental groups are suing to get the grant money restored. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in one case, in which Earthjustice and other groups argue the executive branch can’t cancel a congressionally authorized program like the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program simply because the president disagrees with the policy.

EJ, DEI, and Race

The EPA in the past has defined environmental justice as the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, culture, national origin, income, and educational levels with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of protective environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”

That definition is no longer on the EPA website.

To many, the language in Trump’s executive order suggests the administration has conflated EJ with DEI, and both with communities of color. That’s not an entirely outlandish concept, because many EJ communities are indeed mostly Black or Brown, according to Matthew Tejada, the longtime former director of the EPA’s environmental justice division.

But the EPA historically hasn’t used race as a factor for determining which communities are disadvantaged. Doing so could make federal decisions legally vulnerable, said Tejada, now senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Instead, the Biden administration used factors such as energy burdens, climate change impacts, legacy pollution, income levels, and high school graduation rates to judge which areas count as EJ communities. By those metrics, Wise County—where Pound is located—was considered “disadvantaged” by a White House Council on Environmental Quality screening tool, even though 90.2% of the region identifies as White and only 1.2% of the population is foreign-born.

Leabern Kennedy, the vice-mayor of Pound, Va.

Photo: Courtesy of Lynda Hubbard

Moreover, 81% of Wise County voted for Trump in the 2024 election, leaving some Pound residents puzzled about why their flood funding was pulled back.

“Whoever made the decision, they did not educate themselves,” Kennedy said. “A lot of times people see us as just a bunch of backwards hillbillies that don’t have any sense.”

Adam Ortiz, who led the EPA office in charge of Appalachia during the Biden administration, remembers visiting the region when he served and holding more than 100 meetings in communities that needed help cleaning up contaminated lands and waterways, reclaiming abandoned buildings and blight, and repairing primitive water infrastructure that discharged raw sewage into local streams every day.

“At every one of those meetings—every one—we were welcomed,” said Ortiz, now deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of the Environment. “Not once was it an issue that I was a Democratic appointee or a member of the Biden administration.”

“People were just relieved to finally have support after decades of being ignored,” Ortiz said.

Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin during a May 20 House hearing about Pound’s grant, as well as other flood mitigation awards in his district.

Griffith said he didn’t understand why those grants were deemed EJ grants, and asked if the EPA would be willing to “find some other ways to take care of some of these important projects that actually are meritorious.”

In response, Zeldin said in the hearing that he would “love to” work with Griffith, saying some of the grants may have been canceled for reasons that could be reviewed and tweaked.

Appalachian Voices’ termination letter left open the possibility that the grant was being taken back not because of its connection to EJ or DEI initiatives, but rather because of waste, fraud, abuse, or duplication, or because it failed to “serve the best interest of the United States” for some other reason.

However, the words “environmental justice” appear in the grant program’s name, and several EPA documents stress that EJ is at the heart of what the program sought to address.

In response to questions about why the grant was canceled, an EPA spokeswoman said in an email that “maybe the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission.”

She also said the EPA “will continue to work with states, tribes, and communities to support projects that advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Similar Cases

Stories like Pound’s can be heard throughout Appalachia.

In West Virginia, the National Wildlife Federation won part of a $12 million grant in 2023, supporting five states and the District of Columbia, to help small communities learn how to find and apply for grants on their own.

Many rural communities don’t have the staffing or expertise to do that work, leaving them at a disadvantage against bigger cities with full-time grant writers on staff, said Quenton King, an Appalachian Voices government affairs specialist who worked on the grant as a sub-award partner. The grant program, known as the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (TCTAC) program, is meant to connect small communities with professionals who can show them the ropes.

Pennington Gap, in southwest Virginia near the Tennessee and Kentucky borders, received a federal grant to address “the housing-based causes of lead poisoning” and other health issues. The grant was terminated by the Trump administration, and later restored.

Photo: Courtesy of Sidney Kolb

But like Pound’s award, the TCTAC grant had the words “environmental justice” in its name, and the grant documents repeatedly mention the need to help underprivileged communities. The grant was canceled Feb. 21.

“A lot of the actions the administration has taken are directly harmful to many people who voted for Trump, or didn’t vote at all,” King said. “And I totally believe that, yes, because of ‘environmental justice’ or this list of words that were in these grant applications, that’s why they were targeted.”

The EPA didn’t respond directly to questions about why the grant was canceled.

Similarly, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection got a $1 million Environmental Justice Government-to-Government Grant in 2024 for a statewide pilot project to create action plans to protect the public from harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals,” which can be found in water, air, and soil.

Even when news started trickling out that the EPA was rescinding EJ grants, Autumn Crowe, deputy director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition—a partner in the grant—thought the funding was safe because the money had been awarded to a state agency.

But in March came word that the coalition’s money was being taken back, on the grounds that it didn’t align with the priorities of the new administration.

As a result, several community ambassadors who had been hired and trained had to be let go. About two dozen groups that had been working on developing communications materials and doing translation services for the Hispanic community also had to be let go.

“When you talk about government efficiency, that was the most inefficient thing they could have done,” Crowe said.

Process, Not Policy

Zeldin hasn’t publicly challenged the notion that some communities need more help than others—only the way the Biden administration tried to address the problem.

“Some believe that so-called ‘environmental justice’ is warranted to assist communities that have been left behind,” Zeldin said in a March 12 statement. “This idea sounds good in theory and receives bipartisan support. But in reality, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities.”

The Trump administration has consistently argued that the executive branch has the authority to decide how best to allocate grant funding, including terminating or pausing grants an agency deems inconsistent with the administration’s priorities.

The EPA also told a federal court that it’s rational for an administration to pause grants, pending a determination about whether to keep the funding going.

And some groups are having success getting their EJ grants restored.

On June 17, three nonprofit groups won the reinstatement of their awards in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, on the grounds that Congress “expressly required EPA to use the appropriated funds for ‘environmental justice’ programs,” wrote Judge Adam B. Abelson.

The West Virginia DEP’s PFAS grant was also reinstated on July 1. No reason was given for the reinstatement, Crowe said.

‘We Deserve Support’

A coalition of environmental groups and counties—including Appalachian Voices—in June challenged the EPA’s decision to scrub its Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program, arguing that the move violates separation-of-powers principles by repealing an act of Congress based purely on the administration’s preferences. The grants were codified into law under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.

Separately, Massachusetts Democratic Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell issued multistate guidance in June affirming the importance and legality of EJ efforts.

People whose communities need help generally don’t care what a funding program is called, what its official purpose is, or whether it was issued by a Democratic or Republican administration, said Rebecca Shelton, director of policy at Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center in Whitesburg, Ky.

“No matter what race you are, there are people here living with a disproportionate level of impact on their lives from extractive industry,” she said. “When you’re actually face to face with folks, or when you are in a collaborative setting, a big part of it is being willing to hear from and connect with the people who are experiencing these challenges.”

Dana Kuhnline, program director at Reimagine Appalachia in Cincinnati, largely agreed.

“There’s a broad understanding that Appalachia is a disadvantaged region,” she said. “Call it EJ, call it whatever you want. We deserve support now that the coal is gone. That’s an uncontroversial thing to say.”