When President Donald Trump signed an executive order to halt federal spending on January 27, its impacts hit close to home. Despite the decision being rescinded two days later, the fate of funding for environmental work remains murky due to the vague language and unclear legality of the sweeping order. This leaves sustainability-focused groups, including the Philadelphia-based Clean Air Council, unsure of what’s to come, whether their work can continue or if previously agreed upon contracts will be fulfilled.
Clean Air Council’s executive director, Alex Bomstein, sat down with Grid Thursday to explain what it has actually been like for the nonprofit — which focuses on protecting and preserving air and water quality, public health, environmental justice and clean energy and transportation — working in the face of decisions made on Capitol Hill.
What have you and your team been working on that’s now threatened by the actions of the Trump administration?
The biggest threat right now is the ongoing uncertainty about our [Environmental Protection Agency] grants. We’ve entered into three grant agreements with EPA to do work relating to air monitoring in Pennsylvania and Delaware, as well as composting in the Pittsburgh region. Each of those three grants we are already in the middle of and we’ve done a lot of work under, and there has been — in the last week and a half — questions about whether these grants are going to continue despite them being binding contracts. We’ve also had trouble accessing the funds.
Just for a little bit of context, unlike many grants, these EPA grants aren’t a pot of money that you receive upfront. They are a pot of money that is not in your accounts but in a government account system called ASAP [Automated Standard Application for Payments]. And you have to do the work first and then get reimbursed for the work through ASAP. You can also do advances for certain amounts of money for a very short period of time before you make those expenditures. Regardless, the bulk of that is subject, obviously, to ASAP being a working system, and it hasn’t been, not consistently in the last week for the first time, since the OMB [federal Office of Management and Budget] memo was issued last Monday night. So that’s been going back and forth whether those grants that we’ve been awarded have been available to us. So we’ve been working hard to make sure that expenses that we’ve incurred, we can try to get reimbursed through that system.
So some of the work that you started, has that been reimbursed as you go on?
Yes, but normally you don’t need to do so every day, right? You do so once in a while. You incur a lot of work then you get reimbursed. But we don’t know whether that system is going to be effective today or tomorrow, so we risk having a lot of expenses and never getting that money back, despite us having entered into an agreement where we do the work and we earn the money as part of the grant.
What could that mean for the Clean Air Council as an organization if that reimbursement just dissolves and it never happens?
Our biggest concern right now is the communities that we’re serving. If we can’t get reimbursed under these grants, we don’t have the resources to just do all this work with no pot of money supporting that work, which means that we won’t be able to help out these communities in the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia regions and northern Delaware. So that’s a big problem for those communities, which, at least in terms of the air quality grants, means that we won’t get the good data needed to understand what all the issues are with the poor air in some of those regions and work to be able to address that poor air quality. And of course, that means people will get sick more, people will die more. [Poor] air quality is deadly. That’s one of the issues that we were formed to address, and that’s what we’re trying to do every day with our work.
In addition to having to stop the project funded by these grants because of the lack of funds to cover those expenses, will there be a domino effect of impacts on other projects?
It’s certainly harmful to our organization to have a big hole blown into our budget. This is a significant amount of money. The three EPA grants are collectively more than a million dollars. And we’re not a huge company. We’re a nonprofit of 30-some people. We need to keep the lights on. Our employees need to pay their rent and groceries.
How is the organization responding? Is there anything it’s able to do?
We’ve worked very diligently over the last week and a half to make sure we’re doing our best to minimize the harm from the situation. We’ve been in touch with EPA to try to resolve the issues. We have reached out to our members and the public asking them to reach out to their representatives to make clear that this process of just entirely wrecking the federal government is not beneficial to our economy. It’s not beneficial to the communities that we live in. And we’ve been obviously looking internally to see how we can figure things out within our organization as well.
Have you been getting responses from EPA?
Yes, and I’ll mention that this is certainly not meant to blame the federal workers at EPA who’ve been working there for years doing their best to try to serve the American public. And they are responding to us, but the information that they have is unclear, as far as I’m aware. And things change daily. Some days we have access to the accounts. Some days we don’t. Some days it’s one but not others. It’s a moving target, and of course that makes it very difficult to plan.
On those days where you have access to the accounts, what does that mean? Are you able to advance anything with putting in the information to say, “we need this reimbursement,” or is it simply just we can log in, we can see this agreement that we have?
We have been able to get some amount of reimbursement from EPA during this process. But again, it’s been hit or miss.
What are you seeing and hearing locally across environmental, sustainability-focused organizations regarding the uncertainty of these programs and projects and funds?
This is hitting lots of groups across the region, and I spoke with representatives of some of these groups who’ve been experiencing the same things that we have. Even groups that don’t have EPA grants, it’s affecting their work, because this is a huge hit to the American economy and this is a huge hit to all the communities that all of these groups serve.
[…] The National Council of Nonprofits filed a lawsuit immediately after this OMB memo was issued because this is not just an environmental issue. This is an issue for groups of all sorts. As you may know, Medicaid portals weren’t working after this happened across the country. [The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s] assistance for North Carolina was affected. Every type of federal grant and loan program was affected by this.
What has the feeling been? What kind of atmosphere is there in your own workplace, and when interacting with other groups who are doing similar things?
There’s, of course, a lot of concern about what this means. We don’t know what the next thing is that’s going to happen here. And when you have something as big as this “Defund America” memo that OMB issued, it’s really sweeping. It touches everybody. Many people have felt it already, some people have not.
Is there any way that perhaps the state could help in terms of funding, or is this simply something that needs to be worked out federally? I understand the grant is through EPA, it’s an agreed-upon contract, but is there anything that could be done?
Well, I think everybody really needs to be speaking out against this, from just any person on the street to the governor. Everybody needs to be speaking out against this. I could be getting this number wrong, but I think I heard something like half [39%] of the state budget is from federal funding. And that’s not unusual, right? So yeah, everybody needs to be speaking out. And not just speaking out, but making it harder for Elon Musk to systematically destroy our federal government.
Given the current circumstances, what’s next?
Well, we have many other programs that aren’t federally funded. Those aren’t affected, but it’s really too early to say what’s going to happen with our work under these EPA grants because things have been changing day to day.
What would you like to see done locally, or even at a state level, to respond?
I would love to see a bipartisan groundswell of people and officials explain that taking a wrecking ball to the federal government is not the way to promote any policy. If you just want to destroy America, sure, that’s a good way to start. But this is not what anybody voted for.
