The Republican spending bill is bad for climate justice too

By Willy Blackmore
Word in Black

Among the many, many provisions in the White House-sponsored budget bill that was signed into law on the Fourth of July are a host of environmental measures that continue the Trump administration’s work to undo any and all progress on climate change. 

“It is not an overstatement to say this is the most anti-environment bill in history,” Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy for the Sierra Club, said in a statement. 

And as the Biden administration was very focused on environmental and climate justice in particular, the new bill targets many of those programs, too, and rescinds the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program entirely.

Environmental activist Mustafa Ali put it plainly: “The bill greenlights pollution — literally. It weakens the Clean Air Act, disables the EPA’s ability to regulate toxic emissions, and rolls back protections for drinking water. It tells corporations they can dump, poison, and profit without consequence. And who suffers? The same people who always suffer.” Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income Americans.

Billions in promised grants now in jeopardy

Established through the Inflation Reduction Act, the program earmarked $2.8 billion in grants, and $200 million in technical assistance to invest in underserved communities —“80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history,” Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Rolling Stone last year. 

While many grants have already been paid out (which hasn’t stopped the EPA from attempting to take that money back), a significant amount of funding through the program remains unawarded. In February, a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said that over $1 billion in IRA environmental justice funding has not yet been obligated. The funding was supposed to remain available through Sep. 30, 2026.

Lawsuits push back against EPA’s rollbacks

Green and Healthy Homes Initiative, which was named by the Biden administration as a regional grantmakers for the Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program, one of a number of ways that the EPA’s IRA funds were being distributed, was one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the EPA filed earlier this year after the agency tried to unilaterally cancel its block grant. The nonprofits won that suit last month. 

“In the bill that went through the House and Senate, the Senate amended to not repeal obligated funds, but only rescind non-obligated funds,” explains Ruth Ann Norton, president of Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI). “Our funds are obligated, as our fourth-circuit ruling deemed. The cancellation of those grants was unlawful, in the words of the judge.”

Fighting for communities

The Maryland-based GHHI is in the process of distributing its block grant to community-based organizations throughout the mid-Atlantic, the region the Biden EPA put it in charge of. 

“We do have about 111 identified subrecipients, 72 of which are fully contracted and have already started to draw on payments,” Norton says. “The whole reason that we work through this dispute is simply to ensure that communities have funds to address issues of environmental quality and to advance public health.”

In another class-action lawsuit that was just filed in June, a similar argument is being made that the EPA can’t reclaim money that was congressionally allocated. That suit seeks to have some 350 previously awarded grants, totaling $3 billion, reinstated.

The end of a short-lived climate justice era?

While there’s a good chance that the legal argument will win there too, and the awarded grants will remain rewarded, the funding that was still available is now likely dead and gone – and the all-too-short era of when the federal government made an effort to address climate justice, funneled billions of dollars into doing so, now seems even more squarely behind us.

‘“We can’t lose our focus on mission,” Norton said, “but I don’t have an answer entirely where we’re gonna go for all of the money, cause even philanthropy doesn’t have enough money to backfill in many communities what government was otherwise funding.”