People gathered to protest the Trump administration during the ‘Hands Off' protest on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on April 5, 2025.
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BRYAN DOZIER/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty/AFP
Scott Vlaun has been working with his school district in western Maine to cut back how much energy it uses and helping his town come up with a plan to deal with climate threats from things like rising temperatures and worsening floods. It's a conservative part of the state where incomes are well below the national average. So, Vlaun says it was a big deal when his nonprofit got federal funding under the Biden administration to assist in lowering people's energy bills and preparing communities for more extreme weather.
“A lot of the work we do is about building resilience,” says Vlaun, executive director of the Center for an Ecology-Based Economy in Norway, Maine, a town of about 5,000 that was once known as the Snowshoe Capital of the World. “But we're also trying to build energy equity, so that the working poor here can afford their electricity.”
Then President Trump took office, and the aid disappeared.
At the end of March, the Environmental Protection Agency told Vlaun that a grant to his organization had been terminated. “The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities,” the agency said in a letter that was shared with NPR.
It's one of scores of funding agreements Congress earlier approved for climate and environmental initiatives that have been frozen or cancelled by the Trump administration. Environmental justice projects like Vlaun's, which are aimed at helping low-income and disadvantaged communities, have been hit especially hard.
Federal judges have intervened, ordering the Trump administration to release promised funds. A lot of the legal arguments so far have revolved around whether the administration violated federal regulations and the Constitution's separation of powers when it withheld money that Congress appropriated.
But a lawsuit filed recently in federal court in South Carolina goes further. A group of nonprofits and municipalities alleges the Trump administration violated their free-speech rights by targeting them over language in their grant documents, including words like “equity” and “socioeconomic,” and trying to force them to use different language. They're not alone: Harvard University filed suit Monday arguing that a federal funding freeze threatens its First Amendment rights.
“You can't use government funding to coerce speech,” says Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents nonprofits in the South Carolina lawsuit.
Vlaun says he's talked to some national organizations about potentially joining litigation against the Trump administration. His nonprofit is trying to push ahead with its work in Maine at the same time it looks for ways to make up an $85,000 budget deficit that was created when the EPA grant disappeared.
“We're working to support the most vulnerable people in our communities,” Vlaun says. “And when you use words like equity, energy equity or something, all of a sudden you're on a blacklist. That just seems bizarre to me.”
The EPA said in a statement that it doesn't comment on pending litigation. The agency has previously said it is “reviewing its grant funding to ensure it is appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.”
The departments of Agriculture, Energy and Transportation, which are also named as defendants in the South Carolina lawsuit, didn't respond to a message seeking comment.
The Trump administration is targeting environmental justice programs aimed at helping poor communities like Louisiana's Cancer Alley that have been disproportionately exposed to pollution. In Reserve, La., the Fifth Ward Elementary School and residential neighborhoods sit near a plant that makes synthetic rubber, emitting chloroprene, which the Environmental Protection Agency lists as a likely carcinogen.
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‘People got their hopes up, and then it went away.'
Trump has vowed to shrink the federal bureaucracy and slash government spending. One focus is initiatives to deal with climate change and environmental threats. As federal funding ground to a halt in recent months, projects ranging from removing lead paint and pipes to cleaning up contaminated land and monitoring pollution were jeopardized.
Grant recipients and activists say the sweeping move to withhold funding threatens the government's reputation as a reliable partner, whether it's to protect human health and the environment or to build big infrastructure projects.
“The market despises uncertainty,” says Beth Bafford, chief executive of Climate United, an investment fund that's suing to stop the EPA from revoking grant funding the agency awarded under the Biden administration. “And so, the instability and uncertainty is not only going to impact what we can do today, but it's certainly going to impact the types of investments our country can make, what we can build, over the next 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.”
As part of its rollback of Biden-era initiatives, the Trump administration is targeting programs aimed at helping poor communities like Louisiana's Cancer Alley that have been disproportionately exposed to pollution from things like refineries and chemical plants.
On his first day in office, Trump revoked an executive order issued by former President Biden that directed agencies to consider the effects of federal policies and programs on “communities with environmental justice concerns.” Weeks later, the Office of the Attorney General said that to ensure the “even-handed administration of justice,” it was rescinding a 2022 memo that prioritized the enforcement of environmental laws in “overburdened and underserved communities.” And in March, the EPA said it was eliminating part of the agency that focused on environmental justice, which Administrator Lee Zeldin called “an excuse to fund left-wing activists.”
The effort to purge environmental justice programs has extended to grant funding that Congress authorized through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which were signed by former President Biden.
The Sierra Club obtained a list of EPA grants marked as terminated as of early March. Many on the list, which was shared with NPR, were for environmental justice projects, including one grant that supported initiatives such as flood mitigation in southwest Virginia, a deep red part of the commonwealth where communities have been shaped by the coal industry's booms and busts.
“The projects that we were doing are deeply rooted in community support,” says Emma Kelly, a new economy program coordinator at Appalachian Voices. She adds, “People got their hopes up, and then it went away.”
President Donald Trump signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025.
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EPA flagged a ‘list of words to avoid' in grant documents
In South Carolina, a nonprofit called The Sustainability Institute received an EPA grant to build new energy-efficient homes, and to repair, weatherize and upgrade existing houses in a historically black community split decades ago by the construction of a highway. After Trump was elected, the grant was repeatedly frozen and unfrozen, throwing the project into disarray.
In late March, an EPA employee emailed the head of The Sustainability Institute about the project, according to a court filing in the federal lawsuit in South Carolina. Attached to the email was a document the EPA employee referred to as a “list of words to avoid,” and another the employee called a “Sanitized Workplan.”
Included in the court filing is a list of words such as “cultural differences,” “discrimination” and “marginalized.” The filing also includes a description of the project in which certain words and phrases are highlighted, such as “disadvantaged,” “predominantly Black neighborhood,” and “sea level rise.” A third document titled “Decision Tree” appears to direct government employees to flag grant documents containing keywords that may conflict with Trump's executive orders.
Discussions that The Sustainability Institute has had with the EPA about its grant funding demonstrate that the government has tried to pressure the nonprofit into using language that's acceptable to the administration, says Meyer of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents The Sustainability Institute in the federal lawsuit.
“The administration might try to pretend like, oh, well, we just have different priorities, and that's why we're moving the money around. But the facts show that that's not true,” Meyer says. “Because what they're saying to this group is, ‘Oh, it's probably fine for you to spend this money on this affordable housing in Charleston as planned, but we want you to talk about it differently.' And that isn't something that the government can do.”
Meyer adds: “Congress has said this [funding] is for environmental justice work in disadvantaged communities. It doesn't matter if that's a priority for the Trump administration. That's how this money has to be spent.”
The power the executive branch can wield over federal spending is being debated in a number of lawsuits. In two separate orders last week, federal judges in Rhode Island and the District of Columbia said agencies do have some power to terminate individual grants, but that they still have to comply with the law and applicable regulations. In the case of the Trump administration's broad funding freeze, the judges said federal agencies appear to have acted arbitrarily and capriciously.
In the South Carolina lawsuit, lawyers for the nonprofits and municipalities suing the Trump administration filed with the court a copy of a March email in which an employee of the EPA's Office of General Counsel acknowledged that the decision to cancel environmental justice grants was made with the knowledge that some of the grants didn't contain terms and conditions “about termination for agency priorities.”
“The courts want to be crystal clear: elections have consequences and the President is entitled to enact his agenda,” Judge Mary McElroy of the federal court for the District of Rhode Island, whom Trump appointed during his first term, wrote in an April 15 order directing the administration to unfreeze grant funding while a lawsuit filed by a group of nonprofits plays out. However, McElroy said federal agencies don't have “unlimited authority to further a President's agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity” laws that Congress passed during the previous administration.
In New Haven, Conn., another plaintiff in the South Carolina lawsuit, the EPA cancelled an environmental justice grant that would have helped city residents swap out old oil-burning heating systems for more efficient heat pumps.
“There's really no potential here for waste, fraud and abuse, and I struggle to see, in any sense, how helping struggling residents transition to cleaner, lower-cost heating systems conflicts with merit and fairness,” Steven Winter, New Haven's executive director of climate and sustainability, says, citing rationales the EPA provided in the termination letter.
“We went into this project with a lens of focusing on neighborhoods with the highest rates of air pollution and associated health issues,” Winter says, and on “residents who are struggling the most with their utility bills.”
At stake in lawsuits like the one in South Carolina is the concept of “viewpoint neutrality,” which is a “bedrock principle underlying our First Amendment,” says Nadine Strossen, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression who is not involved in the lawsuit.
“Even though you do not have a right to receive federal funding,” Strossen says, the government can't “deny the funding or remove the funding because of disagreement with the viewpoint or the ideas or the perspectives of the grantee.”
Harvard raised a similar argument in a lawsuit it filed to stop the Trump administration from freezing billions in grants and contracts after the school rejected the government's demands that it change hiring, admissions and other policies.
“The freeze and the looming threat of additional funding cuts will chill Harvard's exercise of its First Amendment rights,” the university said in a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts. Harvard said it won't be able to decide academic matters “without fear that those decisions will run afoul of government censors' views on acceptable levels of ideological or viewpoint diversity on campus.”
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing on Tuesday that Harvard lost federal funding because it broke the law. In a letter to the university on April 11, the Trump administration said Harvard “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.”
Environmental Protection Agency employees take part in a march in Philadelphia in March against actions taken by the Trump administration.
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First Amendment scholars see evidence the government is trying to punish groups for their views
Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, says it seems the Trump administration is trying to “purify” the federal government ideologically, in part by defunding initiatives that reflect views and beliefs that are at odds with the administration's.
“I think that that effort, because it is viewpoint-based, is inconsistent with large parts of the spirit of the First Amendment,” Lakier says. She adds, however, that it could be tricky to prove the administration is violating people's free-speech rights by targeting things like climate and environmental grants.
For example, Lakier says the government could try to argue that grant-funded projects involving activities like replacing heating systems in low-income housing don't have anything to do with free speech.
But Lakier says the chart cited in the South Carolina lawsuit that appears to direct government employees to flag grant documents that contain certain language is “good evidence that there's a viewpoint-based motive, that they're punishing these organizations because of their viewpoints.”
Previously, Lakier and Strossen both argued in support of the National Rifle Association when the group claimed its free-speech rights had been violated by a New York state official who allegedly pressured banks and insurance companies to blacklist the NRA following a deadly shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
“No matter who you are and no matter what your most important beliefs are, there will be a time and a government official and perhaps a majority of people in your community who will strongly disapprove of your viewpoint,” Strossen says. “And you will be so grateful that the viewpoint neutrality principle will prevent that government official from directly or indirectly silencing, punishing or chilling your cherished expression of your favored beliefs.”
In Maine, Vlaun says actions the Trump administration has taken over the past few months have sent a chill through climate activists. Some are afraid they'll face retaliation if they speak out, he says.
“You wonder where it's all going to stop,” Vlaun says. “I mean, to talk about environmental justice and to talk about, you know, people that are vulnerable to climate change and trying to help them and being vilified for that, it's just kind of — I don't know, I can't think about it too much, because it just, it kind of makes you crazy.”
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