Judge says EPA illegally cancelled a $2.8 billion environmental justice program

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A federal judge in South Carolina ruled this week that the Trump administration’s termination of environmental justice grants was “illegal.” The decision dealt a setback to efforts to dismantle a Biden-era program that funded projects addressing environmental and public health challenges in underserved communities across the country. 

In the ruling, US District Judge Richard Gergel found that the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to eliminate the $2.8 billion Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program was unlawful and voided the action. 

However, Gergel stopped short of issuing a permanent injunction requiring the agency to resume administering the program. He said such an order would likely require the federal government to rehire staff responsible for overseeing the grants, which appeared “impractical” since the Trump administration already fired those employees. The judge also denied a request to extend the program’s September deadline for awarding grant funds.

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the lawsuit in partnership with the Public Rights Project. Kym Meyer, the center’s litigation director, said the organization is still “working through” the ruling.

“We’re anxious to talk to EPA and to see how they’re planning to move forward, and then we will figure out what our own next steps need to be,” Meyer said, adding that the grant program should resume as soon as possible.

The grant program was established under the Inflation Reduction Act as part of the Biden administration’s broader efforts to address longstanding inequities across the nation. The grants were intended to support community priorities, such as reducing pollution and bolstering public health and climate readiness, according to budget documents. 

The grants were often awarded to community groups, in partnership with local governments, to address issues such as rising utility costs, air pollution, decaying infrastructure, and extreme heat.   

“These are projects that hundreds of communities across the country had been working on for years,” said Zealan Hoover, a former senior advisor to the EPA Administrator and director of implementation. “These are projects that would have addressed long-standing sources of local pollution or climate risk, and it is really tragic that these grants were terminated.”

One of the grant recipients, the nonprofit CleanAIRE NC, which works to improve the health of North Carolina residents, received $500,000 to install air sensors across four communities in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. 

“These communities are all in areas that experience higher pollution exposures than the more affluent neighborhoods surrounding them, resulting in vastly different experiences and health outcomes,” said Andrew Whelan, the director for communications strategy. “They’re closer to major highways, greater industrial activity and polluting factories and coal plants.”

The data would be used to help educate communities on how to advocate for cleaner air, he said.

At the beginning of his term, President Donald Trump issued executive orders, one of which paused “the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act” and another that directed agencies to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law…‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.” 

According to court documents, an EPA official told the court that, after a review, he decided to terminate the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant Program last February for “policy reasons.” Gergel found that the decision was unlawful.

In a similar lawsuit over the same grants, Gergel also ruled in favor of CleanAIRE NC and other plaintiffs, but the the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision. This time, the case concerned the legality behind the cancellation of the entire program, rather than individual grants. 

A spokesperson for the EPA said in a written statement that the agency is “reviewing the decision.”

“For decades, the families of north Mecklenburg County have been forced to wait for basic transparency about the air they breathe,” Whelan of CleanAIRE NC said in an email. “While it’s too soon to know how this ruling will impact individual grant recipients, the court has validated that our community was wrongfully deprived of these critical air monitoring resources.”