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Federal grant cancellations and freezes worth at least $13 million have hit projects to monitor air pollution, plant trees and protect residents from extreme summer heat in the Philadelphia region.
“We’re very disappointed,” said Russell Zerbo, an advocate at the nonprofit Clean Air Council. The organization received notice this week that its Environmental Protection Agency grant to launch an air pollution monitoring program around the Delaware City Refinery had been terminated.
“We will absolutely not be able to do this project without this grant,” he added.
The refinery has a history of fires and environmental violations. It once paid state environmental regulators close to $1 million to settle violations, including releasing dangerous air pollutants.
Nonprofits, states and local governments across the country have faced uncertainty around federal funding for environmental projects since President Donald Trump took office and ordered federal agencies to pause grant payments under former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
While a federal judge ruled earlier this month to extend a block on the Trump administration’s funding freeze, some grant recipients have still reported finding their funding frozen without explanation.
“There’s a lot of chaos and cruelty,” said Adam Ortiz, former head of EPA’s Region 3, which is headquartered in Philadelphia. “It’s uncertain what legal authorities exist, but there’s no question that this is the most coordinated attack on environmental progress since the EPA was created in 1970.”
Early this week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency had cancelled 400 “DEI and Environmental Justice” grants across nine programs, totaling $1.7 billion.
Environmental justice efforts, a priority of Biden’s EPA, have been a target of the Trump administration’s cuts.
The Clean Air Council’s nearly $500,000 grant from the EPA’s 2023 Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem Solving grant program would have funded a community air monitoring network around the refinery to measure several cancer-causing or hazardous pollutants commonly associated with oil refining, which Zerbo said are not currently monitored continuously or in real-time. It also would have helped the organization create a disaster preparedness network with nearby residents.
Without this project, “people will be on their own if there’s a fire or something there, to try to get information,” Zerbo said.