EPA workers silenced as agency cancels hundreds of grants

Environmental Protection Agency staff members across the country have been told by supervisors they are prohibited from communicating with grantee partners they are supposed to supervise and monitor, according to multiple sources inside the EPA and others working directly with the agency.

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

"I have never experienced anything like this," said Melissa Bosworth, who runs a small nonprofit organization based out of Denver that had been administering an EPA award approved by Congress last May for tribal, school and local municipalities in the mountain west.

Nonprofit leaders from across the country with EPA grants and contracts describe weeks of a communication blackout. Bosworth said her local contacts at the EPA's Region 8 office stopped responding within days of President Donald Trump's inauguration. She and her partnering organization, Montana State University, noted they reached out repeatedly to their local point of contact but got no response.

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

Then, at the end of February, she received formal notice that her grant had been terminated. The purpose of the grant was to help cities, tribes and schools in rural Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas gain access to federal funding for projects focused on clean drinking water, disaster preparedness, emissions reduction and food security.

The termination notice, reviewed by ABC News, suggested her contract might have been canceled because of the president's executive order to shutdown diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

"It was about helping fight disparities on behalf of small cities and rural schools," she said. "So often it is the big universities and big institutions that have the expertise to get funds. I worry the disparity for rural America, tribes 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 severe medical challenges. They both have now been laid off.

"We thought there was a good chance they would try to terminate our contracts, but without any actual communication, we did not have anything formal to fight against," Bosworth told ABC News. "We did not know what was real, if we could spend money or how to ask questions. I wonder if the ambiguity was part of the strategy."

While the communication blackout appeared to be sweeping in multiple regional offices and consequential for grant recipients, it did not seem to apply to all EPA staff nationwide.

Even before receiving the termination notice, Bosworth said she struggled 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 payment system off and on, without explanation or notice.

In an EPA regional office in Philadelphia, staff members described being told in meetings with EPA political appointees based in Washington, D.C., that they are still not permitted to process new awards or even communicate with grant award recipients as late as last week. The edict came despite recent court rulings blocking the administration's proposed federal funding freeze.

And when local EPA staffers pressed their regional bosses about the communications blackout, those bosses told them to comply because they did not want to risk doing anything to jeopardize their jobs, according to multiple sources.

As part of his work advising agencies to reduce spending and cut staff, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have promised transparency and increased oversight over how taxpayer dollars are going out the door. Experts who work in grant management as well as former EPA officials argue the lack of communication will result in the opposite -- less transparency and no oversight.

"The preponderance of evidence is that many program officers are under some kind of gag order, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs," one former EPA official under the Biden administration told ABC News. "If you care about abuse in federal spending, this makes no sense and is absurdly hypocritical."

Typically, EPA staff works closely with nonprofit organizations and local government partners who have been awarded grants, conducting oversight and answering and asking questions about how the government money is being spent.

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

The effective gag order has left nonprofit leaders, local governments and tribes stunned and unsure about how to move forward in spending the EPA grants they were awarded.

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

"Do I fire staff because I can't pay payroll? But if I do, I am not compliant with the grant that says I have to have staff and keep our website," she said on the phone. "It is very high risk for nonprofits."

On Monday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency had decided to terminate over 400 contracts with nonprofit organizations around the country.

"Working hand-in-hand with DOGE to rein in wasteful federal spending, EPA has saved more than $2 billion in taxpayer money," Zeldin wrote in a statement. "It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars."

The EPA did not respond to questions about which contracts exactly were canceled or why, but it appeared environmental justice and community change grants were hit particularly hard in this week's cuts.

Over 100 organizations received community change grants last year, totaling more than $1.6 billion, as part of environmental justice work funded through the bipartisan Infrastructure Reduction Act in 2022. The grants focus on helping low-income, disadvantaged and often rural communities fight air and water pollution, create green spaces and invest in renewable energy and disaster preparation.

On Tuesday, Zeldin also sent an internal memo to all regional administrators saying that the agency planned to eliminate all environmental justice positions and offices immediately.

"With this action, EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit all Americans," the memo, which ABC News reviewed, said.

Many nonprofit leaders who received termination notices in the last few weeks expressed frustration that they were not given the chance to explain their work and said the savings, in their view, were overblown. The news comes as agency leaders were also told to draft plans with a deadline of this week for further staffing reductions.

In terms of savings, in a recent post, Zeldin claimed he saved taxpayers over $12 million by canceling the contract with Kaduru's organization, for example. However, in actuality, it was an $8 million grant, with over half of it already spent.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress last week, Trump said his administration wants to focus on pollutants, saying, "Our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong."

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

"I think it is a shame they are not looking into what we do -- asking what we actually do," Kaduru said. "It is a shame because those environmental justice programs in particular are really are good programs, and I think there is an unfortunate misunderstanding about what environmental justice [is]."