Ask Steve Winter how many times a day he’s checked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant funds portal since January 21 and he answers with a wry laugh: “I couldn’t even say.” January 21st — one day into the Trump administration — he received a notification that the $20 million Community Change grant the City of New Haven had won, in partnership with a coalition of local groups, would be available for use.
But he has not been able to access the account.
“It’s maddening,” said Winter, who is the climate and sustainability executive director for New Haven, and now a first term state representative.
Winter learned a week before Christmas the city had been successful in its application. Then the grant was fully “obligated” on January 17 by the Biden administration.
The funds have never been accessible, and Winter subsequently got notification that the account is “unavailable for payment.” Then, on February 10 around noon, the notification changed to “suspended.”
Want to read more in-depth Connecticut news?
Get CT Mirror’s latest government and public policy reporting in your inbox daily.
Leave this field empty if you’re human:
That happened around the same time a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled, for the second time in ten days, that the Trump administration could not stop disbursement of appropriated federal funds. This time the judge noted the administration had violated his first order and on Tuesday, a federal appeals panel in Boston refused an administration request to put its funding freeze back in place while it appealed.
But the status of New Haven’s community change grant remains particularly worrisome.
The Community Change Grant Program falls under former President Joe Biden’s Justice 40 initiative — a government-wide program that directed 40% of certain climate and environmental funding streams be directed towards disadvantaged communities.
It is one of many diversity efforts — inside and outside of government — Trump has systematically not only eliminated, including Justice 40 specifically, but also used as a political and funding weapon since he returned to office. Tuesday morning, the EPA announced it has placed 171 diversity and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.
The components of New Haven’s project also address climate change, another subject Trump is erasing from the federal lexicon.
Those, combined with his day-one executive order directing all agencies to immediately pause disbursement of any funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), has left the New Haven program, which uses IRA funding, with three targets on its back.
In the wake of Monday’s court ruling, Winter said two other New Haven grant programs, also using IRA funding, that began operating again late last week after an initial freeze, reverted to “suspended” as well. One is an environmental justi