In late 2024, Gretchen Holloway received approval for a new federal grant program that promised to reduce her utility bill by $900 by helping to restore her nearly century-old home.
For years, the retired teacher in Valley, Alabama, tried to maintain the home she’d lived in all her life, but her pension and Social Security income wasn’t enough. The floor has collapsed. One bathroom no longer works. Gaps around doors and windows let air in and out, causing heating and cooling costs to skyrocket.
This plan offers a way out. She said it would “help me keep my home organized.”
Within a few months, it was gone.
A Biden-era initiative called Community Change Grants guide funds From the Inflation Reduction Act to struggling communities. But after President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, his Environmental Protection Agency canceled about $1.6 billion in previously awarded grants, including one that Holloway was counting on.
The decision has ramifications far beyond one town in Alabama, halting programs nationwide to help communities curb pollution and prepare for climate impacts at a time when energy costs are rising sharply.
For those who helped develop the plan, the impact is clear.
“Today, millions of people should be living in safer, healthier, more resilient, more economically prosperous communities,” said Matthew Tejada, a former environmental justice official at the EPA. “But they are not.”
“President Trump has made American energy dominance a top priority from Day One,” EPA Press Secretary Brigitte Hirsch said in a statement. “This agenda is helping to lower the cost of living for American families. EPA is proud to achieve this goal in a way that is accountable to American taxpayers and delivers real results.”
Hirsch said the canceled grants represent a “radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferences” imposed on the agency by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Like Holloway, many Americans face the challenges of aging or inadequate housing. About 50% of the country’s homes were built before 1980, according to Before energy efficiency building codes became widespread, the National Association of Home Builders substandard dwelling. Energy demands are a burden on low-income homeowners, who struggle to afford roof and window repairs to make their homes more airtight and lower their electric bills.
These bills are getting harder to pay. U.S. utilities cut off residential electricity and natural gas services 15 million times According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the system will issue more than 100 million shutdown warnings by 2024. The agency said the problem is particularly acute in the South.
Read more: Soaring electricity bills fuel voter anger ahead of midterm elections
And things could get worse soon. Analysts predict cooling costs will rise again this summer, Pushing the average seasonal bill to $778, An increase of 8.5% over last year. Forecasters call El Niño weather pattern Likely to form this summerthis shift tends to push up global temperatures in the coming months.
Community Change Grants are designed as long-term solutions.
The program, launched by EPA through its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in 2023, encourages local governments, nonprofits and community groups to jointly apply for projects that deliver multiple benefits simultaneously.
Demand quickly exceeded available funds. By the time applications close in 2024, approximately 2,700 groups have applied for more than $40 billion in funding. EPA selected more than 100 projects nationwide.
In western Alaska, Native villages are proposing to replace expensive diesel generators with solar and battery microgrids. In Evansville, Indiana, where air quality issues persist, officials hope to expand e-bike sharing and electric vehicle charging to reduce pollution. In the Gullah Geechee community in Brunswick County, North Carolina, plans are underway to remove lead pipes, restore wetlands and invest in nature-based solutions to improve water quality and reduce flooding.
Valley and neighboring Lanett are the communities targeted by this grant. Lanette is named after the founder of the textile mill, which was a mainstay of the local economy for more than a century before closing in 2006. When the jobs disappeared, many younger residents left, too, said Charles Bagley, a city councilman and lifelong resident. What remains is an aging population living in homes built for generations for factory workers. “Our district’s financial situation has been dire since the plant closed,” Bagley said.
The region’s winning proposal was the work of a coalition of 12 organizations, led by trenda nonprofit dedicated to building local clean energy projects whose partners include circle of carehelping families obtain jobs and housing. For Michael Lowe Weiss, Circle of Care’s director of development, it took months to convince residents the opportunity was real.
“There’s a lot of skepticism,” he said. “You’re asking people to trust that something will eventually get to them.”
At the end of 2024, the alliance was awarded $20 million grant Rehabilitation of approximately 500 homes in Alabama and West Georgia, replacing doors and windows, sealing gaps and upgrading systems to lower energy bills that many residents cannot afford.
The plan also calls for installing solar and battery systems to create 10 “resiliency hubs,” including one at a senior center in Lanette, so residents can gather there to tap into backup power during power outages after storms — an increasingly common occurrence as climate change causes extreme weather.
Once all funding is secured, actual work will begin in early 2025. Groundswell CEO Michelle Moore said the biggest concern was finding enough local contractors.
Like many federal grants, the funds are structured so that recipients spend the money up front and are reimbursed later. Even after Trump was elected, organizers expected the federal government to live up to its promises.
Instead, the EPA announced plans with Elon Musk’s Government Effectiveness Department Cancellation of subsidy In March 2025, as part of a rollback of the environmental justice program, the program said it was reviewing spending and eliminating initiatives it deemed unnecessary and corrupt. The move is one of many in the administration’s broader attack on climate-related jobs and science, including mass layoffs, regulatory reversals and the closure of programs across agencies.
Read more: How Trump’s war on climate science affects all Americans
“We at EPA are committed to being an outstanding steward of tax dollars,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said at the time.
subsequent review An investigation by the EPA Office of Inspector General found no issues with the way the Community Change Grants were awarded, concluding that the agency followed required procedures.
Legal challenges are underway against the elimination of the Individual Community Change Grants, with some plaintiffs arguing the grants are unconstitutional because they violate Congress’ authority over federal spending. In most cases to date, courts have not ruled on the substance of that argument, instead directing plaintiffs to seek monetary relief in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. However, at least one judge has ordered some of the benefits reinstated.
Moore said her team is still weighing whether to file a lawsuit. When she first received the termination letter, she thought she could change her mind through the EPA’s administrative appeals process. She reasoned that Trump promised to cut energy bills by 50% and that her plan would help achieve that goal.
But now the group has exhausted the process without producing any results, a fact that Moore finds frustrating.
“Breaking a contract is a huge breach of trust,” she said. “But the damage could be greater than that – potentially losing the one thing these families still have, which is a roof over their head.”
Karen Hill, Lanett’s former medical administrator, was initially dismissive of the energy efficiency program, but research and local meetings convinced her it was real. She urged others to sign up, both in person and on Facebook. “I started banging the drum: ‘Hey, we could use this,'” she said.
Hill and her husband, who has dementia, live on about $1,200 a month in Social Security payments in the house the foundation is slowly growing apart from. The cost of repairs was far beyond their means. The same is often true of their utility bills. After the cold snap earlier this year, the cost hit $800 a month, as air seeped through foundation cracks and just about everywhere else.
When the program was shut down, Hill was frustrated, feeling that her advocacy had let others down: “They looked at me and said, ‘Look, I knew that was going to fail.'”
The restoration Holloway hoped for also never materialized. Her bills are still high. Now she’s doing what she can to restore her house piece by piece.
Photo: Karen Hill and her husband at their home in Lanett, Alabama. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg)
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