PITTSBURGH — The Biden administration pledged more than $53 million to community groups across the country for air monitoring projects in 2022, many of which were just getting underway when Trump took office.
Trump issued executive orders that temporarily froze federal funding for environment-related projects (along with other key services and programs across the country), then fired and re-hired staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has caused confusion and delays in the implementation of key environmental health programs nationwide. The uncertainty has only been intensified by the news that the agency is repealing dozens of environmental regulations and plans to close all of its environmental justice offices.
Programs facing a funding freeze included the 132 air monitoring projects in 37 states slated to receive $53.4 million in federal funding, which represent the agency’s largest investment in community air monitoring to date.
Western Pennsylvania is one of a handful of geographic regions that received funding for multiple community air monitoring projects under the program. The region is home to numerous pollution sources that impact environmental health, including fracking, steel mills, petrochemical plants, and other industrial manufacturing. Exposure to this pollution increases the risk of cancer, heart and respiratory disease, premature death, and even mental illness.
“I think there’s a misconception about abuse and waste of these federal funds that is so important to counter,” Ana Tsuhlares Hoffman, director of the air quality program at Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, told EHN. The CREATE Lab is managing and analyzing the data collected from all of the federally-funded community air monitoring projects in western Pennsylvania. Organizations receiving federal funding, Hoffman said, need to be “open and up front about what we stand to lose if we lose this funding.”
EHN spoke with Hoffman about how the Trump administration’s actions have impacted air monitoring projects in the region, and environmental health research and advocacy more broadly.
Editor’s note: This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
EHN: What impacts on local environmental health research and advocacy have you seen from the federal funding freeze?
Hoffman: We had four weeks of waking up not knowing if we’d be able to pay salaries for key staff or keep our promises to community members while our funds weren’t accessible and EPA staff were not allowed to communicate with us at all.
It was a long, difficult process to administer the grants for the EPA’s community air monitoring projects. I’m so grateful to the nonprofits that took on this role — they’re all tiny compared to the organizations that usually receive federal funding, but they stepped up to figure out how to administer these grants on behalf of smaller grassroots organizations and individuals who’d been doing this work on their own for decades.
Local nonprofits including FracTracker Alliance, Protect PT, GASP, and the Breathe Project worked together to decide who would represent different geographies and specific industrial polluters that had concerned residents for a long time. There was a lot of pressure to comply with the EPA requirements, which included a long list of quality assurance concerns we’d never encountered before. Securing those grants was hard-won and painful to achieve, but at the end of the process we felt like we’d leveled up our air monitoring capabilities in a meaningful way.
We spent years getting to this place, and were just starting to collect air monitoring samples and process data when we learned about the funding freeze. It felt like years’ worth of activists’ and researchers’ time and effort was hanging in the balance.
The big concern was whether we’d be able to pay people who were just hired to conduct new, federally-funded air monitoring projects, and whether we’d be able to keep the commitments that we’ve made to residents. That was a horrible moment where we had to go to residents to say, “We know we’ve been telling you for years that we’re working to get you answers about what you’re breathing next to this compression station or factory, but we’re not sure if we can follow through on that commitment.”
EHN: What’s the status of those air monitoring projects now?
Hoffman: As of right now, our grants have been un-suspended and reinstated, and we are able to access our funds, so we’re resuming the work. Our legal advisors have reminded us that we need to stay in compliance with our grant funds by continuing the work, even if it seems like there’s a chance the rug will be pulled out from under us.
There’s a national network of federal funding recipients that’s facilitated by the Environmental Protection Network, which has been providing pro bono legal assistance to groups impacted by the federal funding freeze. They helped us organize instead of panicking, and groups across the country were able to successfully win back access to our funding by working in a coordinated way.
Speaking as a university representative, there are labs like the CREATE Lab all across the country that serve local environmental research needs and are funded by federal dollars that are in much worse straits than we are. In cases like that, universities will have impossible decisions to make about whether to continue to support those initiatives as they lose funding for the administrative staff that keep universities running.
EHN: How do you think Trump’s rollbacks of environmental and health regulations could impact enforcement of those regulations at the federal, state, and local level?
We’ve always had to use a combined effort of people power and legal support to effectively watchdog industrial polluters. But now we have less hope that our already significantly-underfunded agencies, like the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, will be able to respond to concerns and conduct inspections in the way that they need to.
There already aren’t enough investigators to come out when watchdogs produce evidence of pollution events that are worthy of investigation, and I do think enforcement is now being deprioritized.
We’ll have to be more thoughtful and diligent in our data collection and evidence collection efforts. We’ll have to be systematic as best we can to try and help fill those gaps.
EHN: How are environmental health advocates changing course to adapt to the new political landscape?
I think we will have to adjust our hopes for engagement with the EPA. We’ll have to collectively change gears to hold polluters accountable as best we can while federal agencies lose access to the resources they need to properly enforce environmental regulations.
We’ll have to accept that “energy dominance for America” means that any push to shift to a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy is going to be hampered, and that our hopes for building a better future will likely need to be put on pause while we focus on defending our previous progress.
We’ll really need to work together. We all only have so many brain cells and so many hours in the day, but when we work collectively we’re much more powerful.