Trump agencies halt environmental, health projects in Black communities

The Trump administration said the changes are needed to curb government spending. Officials have also linked some Biden-era climate programs to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that President Trump and his top aides have said amount to illegal discrimination.

“President Trump was given an overwhelming mandate to stop spending hard-earned taxpayer dollars on the left’s radical climate agenda and restore commonsense to the federal government’s out-of-control spending,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Residents, as well as racial justice and environmental advocates, say the cuts and cancellations leave Black communities without the resources to solve long-term problems and neglect that have contributed to deep racial inequities across the region.

Many of the efforts had been in the works for years, but gained steam after the 2020 racial justice movement. Those who have pushed for them say the Trump administration is unfairly dismissing the initiatives as DEI.

“Old and crumbling infrastructure in these Southern communities that should keep everyone safe and healthy, it’s not going to be repaired or upgraded,” said Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group. “It is incredibly cruel, and it is lazy for the Trump administration to destroy and tear down these programs.”

The Post’s analysis of grant databases and interviews with advocates and nonprofits that spearheaded the efforts identified 22 affected projects that lost grant funding or were undertaken by agency-led lawsuits, orders, and protections. The efforts spanned several federal agencies, including the EPA and the Departments of Justice, Interior, and Agriculture.

The cuts were wide ranging, largely ceasing projects that sought to rectify environmental blight, and health and safety hazards. Others included building a park in Louisville and a community garden in Richmond.

Some federal notices canceling the projects pointed to a general shift in agency priorities. But many cited a Trump executive order to eradicate DEI programs, which it described as “radical,” “wasteful,” and amounting to “forced illegal and immoral discrimination.” The order demands that federal agencies eliminate any positions, offices, initiatives, grants, and contracts related to DEI or environmental justice, which refers to efforts to address disproportionate levels of pollution in poor, often non-White areas.

Here’s a close look at some of the cancellations, several of which are being challenged in court.

Joy Banner and her neighbors in Wallace, Louisiana, for years watched the industrial transformation of their region, a rural landscape along the Mississippi River with centuries-old sugar cane fields where enslaved people once labored and then cultivated their own crops once freed. Gray buildings replaced greenery, smoke clouded the air, pollutants muddied the waters.

Then a company announced plans to build a $400 million grain export terminal. Community members appealed to the National Park Service to have a 11-mile swath of land running through their town and county designated a national historic landmark. That would prevent companies from setting up shop, safeguarding residents’ air, water, and land, Banner said.

“After emancipation, Black communities put together their resources to purchase the land,” Banner said. “The plantations around us have historic status, but we argued that it’s not just the plantations — but especially these Black communities, these Black villages, free town communities that are nestled between these plantations that are also historic.”

In October, the National Park Service determined the land was eligible for federal protection, stating in its year-long study that the area “presents a remarkably unique rural historic landscape” that has remained “rural, agricultural, and stable for more than three centuries.”

The agency said the district also illustrates “an alternative narrative to the stories of sharecropping and the Great Migration” — enslaved laborers eventually became landholders, remaining in the area for generations.

Four months later, after the company behind the planned grain export terminal dropped its proposal, the Trump administration rescinded the notice of eligibility at the request of state leaders. The Interior Department said the process to deem the area eligible as a historic landmark was moot.

“I’m grateful that the Trump administration understands that states and localities are better at determining their interests relating to clean air, water, and developing industry than leaving crucial decisions like those to Washington,” said Aurelia S. Giacometto, then secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

Banner called the decision a political stunt that undermines the preservation of Black history.

“It is 22,000 acres of land that would have been protected. Now some greedy developer is going to come in and still be able to develop that land,” Banner said. “DEI is just an easy excuse to target vulnerable communities.”

In Virginia, Shelton Tucker just wants the floods to stop.

Tucker grew up in the late 1960s in Hampton’s Aberdeen Gardens neighborhood. It was built by Black architects for Black residents under a New Deal program that offered people coming from overcrowded urban centers the opportunity to farm and own a home. He recalls a childhood of playing in open green space, running around a basketball court and picking the fruit that grew in abundance.

But in recent years, he said, “every time it rains, there’s standing water.”

Climate experts have said the historic neighborhood’s infrastructure wasn’t built for the modern climate, where deluges are increasing in frequency. The storm drains are too narrow, and too few and far between. Now, when it rains, roads become impassable.

The flooding has paralyzed the community at least three to four times in the past year, Tucker said, describing water that reached the hood of his car in some storms. “We’re like sitting ducks if we don’t address it.”

The EPA in December awarded the neighborhood $20 million to remedy the dated water infrastructure. The money came from Biden-era environmental justice grants designed to address problems created by discriminatory government policies, including segregation, redlining, and exclusionary zoning.

But the Trump administration shuttered the EPA’s environmental justice arm in March, saying it had been used to “fund left-wing activists” and didn’t directly help communities.

In June, the city of Hampton received a notice that its grant was canceled because the effort was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”