A year later, we’re all paying for Trump’s assault on the “green new scam”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Village of Sauget in St. Clair County, Illinois, was founded in order to be polluted. Incorporated in 1926 by a group of Monsanto Chemical Company executives (and initially named “Monsanto”) it was and is an industry town: with deliberately lax manufacturing and emissions laws, it has played host to companies like ExxonMobil, Clayton Chemical, Gavilon Fertilizer, Eastman Chemical, and Veolia North America. 

The 134 residents of Sauget—and the 700,000 people in the greater East St. Louis metro area that surrounds it—have often seen their needs come second to those of their corporate neighbors. In the 1990s, according to the last longitudinal EPA study done in the area, they inhaled high levels of lead, volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide compounds that can increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illness.

“We were basically incorporated to be a sewer,” the town’s mayor, Rich Sauget, told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. 

Since 1999, one well-known local polluter has been Veolia Environmental Services, a subsidiary of a French company that runs an incinerator, which stores and burns hazardous waste. The company is certified to burn toxic substances like PFAS, and people in the area have long complained of acrid or sewage-like smells near the facility. 

Darnell Tingle, who leads United Congregations of Metro-East (UCM)—a group of faith communities working to address environmental and social justice issues in the area—says congregants at the half-a-dozen Illinois churches within 10 miles of Veolia often wonder if the incinerator is what’s making them sick. 

According to Lucas King, Veolia’s Sauget Facility Manager, “Veolia North America is committed to safe operations, ensuring our processes are in compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements, and protecting the health of the communities where we operate. We are proud of Veolia’s record of safety, compliance and community partnership-building.”

But Tingle claims, “we have some of the worst air quality in the country.” Children in East St. Louis suffer from asthma at much higher rates than the national average. But it’s hard for the 878 people who live within a mile of Veolia’s incinerator to prove anything. So, in 2023, UCM proposed a solution: they would install air quality monitoring stations on half-a-dozen local churches, pay scientists to analyze that data, and finance the whole thing with $500,000 in Community Change Grant funding, a landmark program of Joe Biden’s EPA. 

Soon, Tingle hoped, they’d have the answers they were looking for. But in early 2025, his promised grant money was abruptly withdrawn by the newly inaugurated Trump administration—along with 105 similar grants, totaling at least $1.6 billion, from Alaska to Florida. The EPA’s new administrator Lee Zeldin, declared the grants “unnecessary,” and with the help of Elon Musk’s now-decommissioned DOGE, froze the money and closed the Office of Environmental Justice, amounting to losses of at least $37 billion. 

Only two of the six planned air-quality monitors were installed in East St. Louis before the grants were terminated, Tingle said—and Tingle’s organization doesn’t have the money to pay scientists to analyze the data those monitors generate. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed an air quality study in Sauget, the main conclusion of which was that, because the EPA has not done adequate data collection, the CDC could not say much about the incinerator’s health impacts. In particular, the agency said, they were unable to conclude whether or not the volatile organic compound levels in the air were hurting people. So the community is still left with poor health effects and lots of suspicions about where they come from—but without concrete proof.

This Community Change Grant program was unique in the realm of federal funding, said Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to Biden’s EPA administrator Michael Regan. “Most EPA funding flows through the states, and that is a model that works well,” Hoover said. “But at the same time, money that flows top down through states takes longer to reach communities and is not always as responsive as grants directly to the frontline communities that have a very clear, well-defined scope of what they need to do.” 

Zeldin and Trump asserted that freezing these grants—which, organizers say, happened without any forewarning from the EPA, sometimes in the middle of grant disbursal and sometimes without communities seeing any money at all—was justified as a way to end the “green new scam” and “eliminate funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” according to a White House fact sheet. 

A year later, many other communities beyond Sauget are also experiencing the grant terminations in starker terms. In Pocatello, Idaho, some of the town’s unsewered neighborhoods still face the unsanitary hardships of nitrate contamination from septic systems in their drinking water source. In the South Bronx, New York, one community remains vulnerable to extreme flooding, in part because their plan to revitalizing a dilapidated waterfront park has been defunded. And in South Dakota, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe’s plan to use $19.9 million in grant funding to (among other things) rebuild a long-unusable bridge, build resilience hubs, weatherize buildings, and install solar panels on the homes of community elders remains just a plan. 

“For many communities, they’ve been going through the stages of grief,” said Hoover. “First was disbelief, because they know the merits of these projects. They know how badly it’s needed by the community. That has evolved over time into disappointment that the agency has been unwilling to reconsider, even after seeing cases like Kipnuk, Alaska, where EPA terminated a grant for flood prevention and then the town was washed away in a flood.” 

The communities and organizations around the country who lost funding have responded in a variety of ways. Some, like UCM in East St. Louis, are hopeful that other forms of funding will turn up—and are refocusing on other projects. Other municipalities and nonprofits are still involved in litigation against the EPA, hoping to recoup some of the losses they’ve sustained in money and in time. 

In South Dakota, rather than making an appeal, the town of Flandreau ended up closing its application for a grant to bring solar power to the homes of some Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation members, according to Rhonda Conn, the associate director of Native Sun Community Power Development, the nonprofit which hoped to work with the town and tribe. 

Native Sun has pushed on to seek funding sources for its other work. The organization secured some local and private funding, but nothing at the scale of the EPA Community Change money has materialized, Conn said. In the process, Native Sun has been forced to work on a very lean budget—no permanent office space, few workers, and few plans to expand. These days, they’re spending more time working on renewable energy workforce development with the state of Minnesota, as opposed to taking big, costly swings at new infrastructure projects. 

“For us, the infrastructure stuff is not going to go away,” Conn said. “It’s just about where we’re balancing our energy right now.” 

In green energy and disaster resilience work, organizations are competing under higher pressure for less money. “There are still some grant and loan programs operating at lower levels across the government, there are still sources of state, local, and private funding,” Hoover said. “But there are not multibillion-dollar sources of funding commensurate with what the Trump administration terminated.”

“It’s very stressful,” Conn said. “Because everybody now is scrambling for the same pot of money, and there isn’t enough of it.”