EPA -employees silenced as the agency cancels hundreds of grants

The Environmental Protection Agency’s employees across the country have been told by the supervisor that they are prohibited from communicating with support recipient partners to oversee and monitor, according to several sources inside the EPA and others who work directly with the agency.

And many nonprofit organizations and other EPA beneficiaries have found themselves frozen out of accessing their federal funds without notice or explanation.

“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said Melissa Bosworth, who runs a small nonprofit organization based on Denver, which had administered an EPA award approved by Congress last May for tribal, school and local municipalities in Mountain West.

NonProfit leaders from all over the country with EPA grants and contracts describe weeks with a communication interruption. Bosworth said her local contacts at EPA’s Region 8 office stopped responding within days of President Donald Trump’s inauguration. She and her collaborative organization, Montana State University, noticed that they repeatedly reached their local contact point but got no answer.

ABC News reached out to EPA’s Region 8 office for comment.

Then at the end of February, she received formal announcement that her grants had ended. The purpose of the subsidy was to help cities, tribes and schools in the rural areas of Montana, Wyoming and Dakotas in gaining access to federal funding for projects focusing on clean drinking water, disaster preparedness, reduction of emissions and food security.

The notice message, reviewed by ABC News, suggested that her contract may have been canceled due to the president’s executive order for shutdown of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“It was about helping to fight differences on behalf of small cities and schools in rural areas,” she said. “So often it is the big universities and large institutions that have the expertise to get funds. I worry about the difference to rural America, stems and the smallest communities will get worse.”

Bosworth has a son with autism and her business partner gave birth last month to a baby with serious medical challenges. They have both now been dismissed.

“We thought there was a good chance that they would try to end our contracts, but without any actual communication we had nothing formal to fight against,” Bosworth told ABC News. “We didn’t know what was real if we could spend money or how we ask questions. I wonder if the ambiguity was part of the strategy.”

While the interruption of communication seemed to sweep in several regional offices and consequences for beneficiaries, it did not seem to apply to all EPA staff nationwide.

Even before he received the notice of termination, Bosworth said she was struggling to access her EPA grant. She and dozens of other nonprofit leaders from California to Tennessee said they have been frozen out of the government’s payment system turned off and turned on, without explanation or notice.

In an EPA -Regional Office in Philadelphia, employees described being told at meetings with EPA policy appointed Base in Washington, DC, that they still do not have permission to treat new prices or even communicate with the Grant Award recipients as late as last week. Edict came despite the recent court decisions that blocked the administration’s proposed federal financing freezing.

And when local EPA employees pressed their regional executives on the interruption of communication, these bosses told them to comply because they didn’t want to risk doing anything to jeopardize their jobs, according to several sources.

As part of his work advising agencies to reduce expenses and reduce staff, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have promised transparency and increased oversight of how taxpayers’ dollars go out the door. Experts working in grant management as well as previous EPA officials claim that the lack of communication will result in the opposite – less transparency and no supervision.

“The monitoring of evidence is that many program officers are under a kind of gag order, making it almost impossible for them to do their job,” said a former EPA official during the Biden -Administration to ABC News. “If you are interested in abuse in federal expenses, this makes no sense and is absurdly hypocritical.”

EPA staff typically work closely with nonprofit organizations and local government partners who have been awarded grants, supervised and answered and ask questions about how governmental money is used.

Rebecca Kaduru, president of the Sustainable Communities Institute, based in Nashville, said she has lost access to the payment system at least once a week for the past month. Her organization had two EPA grants until last month when they were completed.

The effective gag order has left nonprofit leaders, local authorities and stems stunned and uncertain how to get on with using the EPA grants they were assigned.

Kaduru explained the strain of chaos over the last few months.

“Do I fire the staff because I can’t pay payroll? But if I do, I don’t meet the subsidy that says I need staff and keep our website,” she said on the phone. “It is very high risk of nonprofit organizations.”

On Monday, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency had decided to terminate over 400 contracts with non -profit organizations around the country.

“Working hand in hand with DOGE to empty wasted federal expenses, EPA has saved more than $ 2 billion in taxpayers,” Zeldin wrote in a statement. “It’s our commitment to EPA to be unique stewards for tax dollars.”

EPA did not answer questions about what contracts were exactly canceled or why, but it seemed that environmental justice and social change grants were hit particularly hard in this week’s cuts.

Over 100 organizations received grants for a social change last year, a total of more than $ 1.6 billion, as part of environmental justice work financed through Bipartisan Infrastructure Reduction Act in 2022. The grants focus on helping low -income, disadvantaged and often rural rural fighting for air and water contamination, creating green areas and investing in senior energy.

On Tuesday, Zeldin also sent an internal memo to all regional administrators who said the agency was planning to eliminate all environmental rights and offices.

“With this action, the EPA delivers organizational improvements to the staff structure that will directly benefit all Americans,” said the memo, as ABC News underwent.

Many nonprofit managers who received termination messages in the past few weeks expressed frustration that they did not get the chance to explain their work and said that the savings were in their opinion excessive. The news comes as agency leaders were also asked to prepare plans with a deadline this week for further reduction of staff.

In terms of savings, Zeldin claimed in a recent speech that, for example, he saved taxpayers over $ 12 million by canceling the contract with Kadurus organization, for example. In reality, however, it was a subsidy of $ 8 million where over half of it was already used.

In a speech with a joint congressional meeting last week, Trump said his administration wants to focus on polluting drugs and said, “Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, toxins out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.”

Both the current career EPA staff as well as nonprofit partners said the cuts and closure of environmental justice offices will make this work more difficult.

“I think it’s a shame that they don’t investigate what we do – asking what we actually do,” Kaduru said. “It’s a shame because especially these environmental justice programs are really good programs and I think there is an unfortunate misconception about what environmental justice [is]”