Toward the end of last February, as a chilly Dallas winter began to warm into a balmy Texas spring, Caleb Roberts hopped online to transfer federal funds to a local bank account. Roberts is the executive director of Downwinders at Risk, a Dallas-based nonprofit devoted to clean air advocacy. After eight months of bureaucratic red tape, the organization finally had access to the half-a-million dollars in federal grant funding they had been awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—or so they thought.
When Roberts reached the federal website used to access the money, he couldn’t log in. In the coming weeks, that story would repeat over and over with no explanation until they were told late last March that their grant had been suspended. On May 1, it was officially terminated.
Downwinders wasn’t alone. Just over $118 million in environmental grants previously awarded to several Texas organizations were terminated by the EPA in the first three and a half months of Trump’s second presidential administration, according to documents obtained by the Texas Observer through an open records request with the EPA. Nonprofits that had built that funding into their budgets suddenly had to reverse course, canceling programs related to environmental education, air quality, waste contamination, and flood monitoring.
