Although the Trump Administration rescinded a memo announcing a freeze on federal allocations Wednesday, the head of the nonprofit Ecology Action Center in Normal says its grant funding is still jeopardized by an earlier executive order.
Michael Brown, executive director of the EAC, said the order issued by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 specifically terminates certain financial disbursements appropriated through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – terminations that could cost the organization as much as $1.7 million.
“That very specifically appears to be targeting the grants that we have through U.S. EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. There was a clarifying memo issued the following day indicating that that was targeting specifically environmental justice related grants, which, again, is what we have through U.S. EPA,” said Brown in an interview with WGLT.
Brown said Wednesday’s backtracking by the administration’s Office of Management and Budget [OMB] doesn’t appear to apply to the previous executive order.
"It appears our U.S. EPA federal grants for doing environmental justice work here in Bloomington, Normal, and McLean County are still very much at risk,” he said.
Brown said there are two active grants directly through the U.S. EPA totaling around $1 million for the EAC and its various project sub-awardees, including Illinois State University and the McLean County Health Department.
He said a third grant of $200,000 from the Illinois EPA but funded by the Inflation Reduction Act is also at risk, as well as a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Brown later informed WGLT that as of Wednesday afternoon, their $500,000 Bloomington-Normal Climate Responsive Community grant from the U.S. EPA was officially suspended and he was no longer able to withdraw funds.
Brown said some of that funding was expected to cover the expense of installing three new air monitors in the environmental justice areas around Bloomington-Normal, a project he said is “midway through” but now in jeopardy.
“Prior to this, we've had one air monitor for all of McLean County, and McLean County is, I believe, the largest, if not one of the largest, counties in the state of Illinois,” he said. “With one air monitor, there's just no way that we can actually know what the public health impacts of air pollution are on all of our residents through one air monitor.”
Other projects Brown said are at risk include assessment of threats from climate change and severe weather, development of a climate adaptation plan, “tree equity” planning efforts, and a feasibility study of transforming organic waste materials into fuel.
“These are all very much bigger projects and trying to address real issues and things that we do not have the local funding to support this level of work. So this federal funding has really been critical to make these things happen,” he said.
Brown said the EAC had received previous assurances that its grants were safe, but the first two weeks of the new administration saw those assurances vanish while leaving confusion and uncertainty.
“We have no plans in place because we were told that they were not at risk, and instead we're seeing that they very much are,” he said. “If we lose this funding, we'll be scrambling to find another way. But it's $1.7 million; that's not easy money to come up with, especially in this economic climate.”
Brown said the EAC does have a lot of ongoing work that is not funded through the federal government.
“We still are plenty busy, but this definitely is very much an unneeded distraction, and it’s costing us a lot of money and time just to deal with this sudden crisis out of nowhere,” he said.
