Trump’s Big Bill Cuts Climate and Environmental Funds to Pay Polluters

The Republican-led House of Representatives is expected to vote Thursday on President Donald Trump’s profoundly unpopular tax and spending bill. It has been called “the most regressive U.S. tax and budget law in at least the past four decades — and possibly ever,” according to researchers at Yale University. 

Trump’s christened it the “Big Beautiful Bill,” but it will cost the U.S. government $4.5 trillion to pay for massive tax benefits that overwhelmingly enrich big corporations and the wealthy by making draconian cuts to public spending and programs for everyone else. It also launches a frontal assault on environmental and climate justice.

The nonprofit law firm Earthjustice calls it “the worst environmental bill in U.S. history.”

The fossil fuel industry has been aggressively lobbying on the bill, winning hand-outs as the chief executives of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon, and other companies personally rake in millions of dollars from Trump’s first wave of tax cuts. Among the pounds of flesh the bill extracts are key climate and environmental justice provisions enacted by Congress to protect public health, reduce pollution and harmful greenhouse gas emissions, and strengthen the ability of communities across the country to go head-to-head with petrochemical and oil and gas giants amid the worsening climate crisis.

For the people I met in Louisiana’s rural communities and struggling inner-city neighborhoods last week, the expected toll of the Trump megabill is profoundly personal. They live in some of the hardest-hit areas of the country experiencing a double-whammy of fossil fuel and petrochemical pollution and climate devastation. They work in or are served by small local community-based organizations that received or hoped for grants from the federal government to support environmental and climate justice through programs established as part of the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress in 2022 under President Joe Biden. 

Their grants were early targets of Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Over the course of four months, from February through May 2025, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) terminated every environmental justice grant awarded by the agency, totaling nearly 800 grants. It is one part of Trump’s all-out-assault on environmental justice and racial justice more broadly. As Nikole Hannah-Jones explains, Trump has initiated “the broadest and most significant assault on civil rights and racial integration in this country in more than a century.”

Lawsuits have challenged the grant terminations — including a new class action launched last week, and courts across the country have repeatedly found the Trump administration’s actions to be illegal. U.S. District Court Judge Adam Abelson wrote, in an opinion on June 17, that in canceling a group of environmental justice grants, “precisely because they are environmental justice programs,” the “EPA contends that it has authority to thumb its nose at Congress and refuse to comply with its directives.” He ruled that EPA has no such authority.

Republicans are now trying to use the hopped-up, fast-tracked, and obnoxiously named “Big Beautiful Bill” to either eliminate these programs entirely or, if that fails, permanently zero out their funds to help pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy. If the effort to wipe out these programs is successful, the impact will be deadly, particularly as Trump and the Supreme Court simultaneously gut regulations and oversight of fossil fuel, petrochemical, and other major polluters. 

A current EPA employee confided with me anonymously that the result will surely be that more people get sick and die. “There’s no way that couldn’t happen,” she tells me. “There’s just no way, scientifically, that there won’t be an increase.”

Concerned Citizens of St. John

At 3 a.m. on May 14, Tish Taylor got the news of a lifetime. Phone calls and emails poured in, declaring, “Denka is closing!” 

Taylor, 61, has grown up in the shadow of the massive Denka petrochemical plant in St. John the Baptist Parish. She joined her father, Robert Taylor, in his decade-long effort organizing against Denka’s toxic pollution. First, she felt pure elation that the plant could be shutting down, then disbelief. “This can’t be real,” she thought, “but it was wonderful.” She immediately told her father, then went outside, smelled her flowers, and let the news sink in. “It’s real,” she said to herself. 

In 2016, Robert Taylor, now 84, founded Concerned Citizens of St. John, a small, feisty, and until recently all-volunteer community organization going head-to-head against Denka. Like many other similarly situated groups I meet in Louisiana, Concerned Citizens has been aided in its efforts by federal dollars (and had hoped to apply for more) that would be eliminated by the Trump tax bill. The money was working, making them better resourced and effective, and thus a larger threat to the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry and its political allies.

The Taylors live in Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of communities along the Mississippi River congested with fossil fuel and petrochemical plants that are heavily concentrated in Black neighborhoods, their toxic emissions polluting the air and intensifying the climate crisis. St. John has the highest cancer risk in the nation from toxic air pollution at seven times the national rate. 

St. John is home to a sprawling Marathon oil refinery that nearly encircles the graveyard where much of the Taylors’ family is buried. There is the Evonik petrochemical plant and other facilities. But in 2018, EPA released data showing that 85 percent of the toxic air pollution in St. John can be traced to just one facility: the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, which uses chloroprene, a particularly toxic petrochemical derived from fossil fuels, to produce neoprene used in synthetic rubber production.

Standing in her father’s home, Tish Taylor shares photos with me of her mother who recently passed away after a long battle with cancer, and of her sister Raven, who has suffered decades of debilitating illness, experiencing three lumpectomies, the removal of her uterus, colon, and stomach, and a rare autoimmune disease, neuronal VGKC antibody syndrome. (Autoimmune disease has been linked to chemical exposure.) Tish’s children and grandchildren suffer from respiratory ailments, including asthma.

Robert Taylor has gained a good deal of recognition for his efforts against Denka. But he was still shocked when he received a phone call in 2021 from the administrator of the EPA, Michael Regan. The Biden administration had made environmental and climate justice a national priority, and Regan called to ask Taylor what he needed from the agency. “I said, ‘We desperately need to know what it is we’re breathing,” Taylor recalls. “‘We’re dying from it. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how much it is. We need to have control. We need your help because the state is not working to help us.’ And he said, ‘I will work on that,’ and he did exactly as he promised.” Taylor also wanted regulation and enforcement to shut Denka down.

Inflation Reduction Act funding includes grants for community air monitoring, which has supported the Taylors’ organizing efforts. The funding for that program, like virtually all environmental and climate justice grants through the Inflation Reduction Act, has been targeted for elimination under the Trump tax bill, according to an analysis by Evergreen Action.

In June 2023, the New Orleans-based nonprofit, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice received a federal grant through the air monitoring program and provided a two-year $82,000 subgrant to Concerned Citizens of St. John — a significant amount of money to the small organization. The Deep South Center explained that the grant would help build capacity of local partners that had already achieved some important milestones, but whose success in addressing “endemic issues will only grow if they are well-resourced.”

Concerned Citizens continued to work with the Biden administration, which increased federal regulations on emissions from petrochemical plants, including Denka. The administration then sued Denka in 2023, charging that there was an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health and welfare of nearby communities due to the unacceptably high cancer risk posed by its excessive emissions. Trump dropped the suit, with his administration issuing a press release stating: “Justice Department Dismisses Suit Against Denka, Delivering on President Trump’s Mandate to End Radical DEI Programs.” 

On March 28, Concerned Citizens of St. John issued its intent to continue the suit against Denka independently (one of many legal actions it has taken against the plant). Six weeks later, on May 13, Denka announced that the plant had been shut down and would not restart production, citing “cost, production, and other challenges,” including the pollution control equipment required by Biden-era regulations (which remain active), inflation, and unscheduled plant outages associated with severe weather events.  

Taylor tells me that he won’t believe Denka is closing until the plant is closed. But he is cautiously optimistic. He points to his friend and ally, Larry Sorapuru, seated now at his side, the only local political official to support their efforts. Taylor says if Denka does follow through on its plan to fully shutter the plant, Concerned Citizens will be watching to ensure it does not leave an even bigger mess behind for the community to clean up. 

He believes he has little choice. These facilities “are a serious threat to our survival here, and they proved that they didn’t care whether we survived or not,” Taylor says.

Deep South Center for Environmental Justice

Dr. Beverly Wright founded the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in her native New Orleans in 1992. She is one of the foremost leading and foundational figures in the U.S. environmental justice movement. 

In addition to the grant mentioned earlier, in 2023, the center also received a $13 million five-year grant to serve as an Environmental Justice Thriving Community Technical Assistance Center, one of sixteen groups selected nationally to receive a total of $177 million supported by the Inflation Reduction Act’s Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant.

The $3 billion block grant alone “is 80 times more than any federal investment in environmental justice in history,” Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me in North Carolina last October. The tax bill would gut the entire block grant, rescinding all unobligated funds, according to an analysis by Evergreen Action.

With the award, the Deep South Center launched a Community Investment & Recovery Center. Its five-year plan was to assist 250 smaller local groups to build their capacity to apply for and hopefully receive federal and other sources of funding. The goal was to build a lasting, well-resourced movement of local frontline community-based organizations. One of the groups they hoped to support again was Concerned Citizens of St. John.

“We’ve developed educational and training tools so communities could speak for themselves to build leadership on the ground,” Dr. Wright tells me, as we sit in her office in New Orleans East. The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice also focuses on research, but, Wright warns, “If data alone was all we needed to make change, we wouldn’t have Cancer Alley. It takes data and advocacy, strong advocacy involvement in the political system so you can control who represents you.”

When DOGE started identifying grants to cut, technical assistance centers were at the top of the list. In his ruling finding certain environmental justice grant terminations illegal, Judge Adelson references a series of internal emails, including from a DOGE appointee (with a proclivity for exclamation points) to EPA: “As you can imagine, the DOGE team has lawyers that are pretty experienced with grant and contract cancellation at this point, so that’s what that is based on!” 

“I understand why they took the [technical assistance centers] first,” Dr. Wright says. “The last thing you want is an educated populace, which is what I learned in civics seventh grade.”

Another early casualty was the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which Trump has been trying to claw back for months. The tax bill rescinds the entire program and all of its unobligated funds. The bill will also go after the funding of the $5 billion Climate Pollution Reduction Program.

The Deep South Center received the letter terminating its grant on February 21. “I read that letter over and over again, and I got angrier and angrier. But my first response is, we’re going to sue,” Dr. Wright tells me. The organization is now a lead plaintiff in a new class action lawsuit challenging the legality of all EPA terminations of Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant recipients. Wright expects that the attempt by Congress to gut these programs in the tax bill will also result in legal action, at least, that’s the plan.

In Louisiana alone, over a dozen environmental justice grants, worth approximately $70 million, were terminated in just the first round of 400 grants, including a grant to the St. James Parish-based Inclusive Louisiana.

Inclusive Louisiana

Collectively, Gail LeBoeuf and Barbara Washington have gathered over one and half centuries of life in rural Louisiana between them. They have probably lost an equal number of friends, relatives, and neighbors to cancers and other diseases which they attribute to the pollution of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry that took up residence within their communities well after each woman was born. Five years ago, they formed Inclusive Louisiana, a small nonprofit organization to support their efforts to hold the industry accountable and transition off of its operations. 

They received a $500,000 grant with local partner organizations Louisiana Bucket Brigade and Rural Roots. It was awarded through an Inflation Reduction Act Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program that provides financial assistance to organizations working to address local environmental or public health issues in their communities. On May 1, the Trump administration terminated their grant. 

Their $500,000 project, named after their campaign, “Imagine St. James Parish,” is modest given the stakes. It would help make local homes more habitable amid the climate crisis, funding a pilot project for weatherization, putting roofs on houses still draped with blue tarps four years after Hurricane Ida devastated the area; reduce energy bills; protect against worsening heat; and clean up dump sites that pose health and safety hazards, particularly in times of tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes.

I meet LeBoeuf and Washington at the “Village Hub” — the name they’ve given to a squat yellow brick house purchased by Inclusive Louisiana in 2023 that serves as a community center for the small town of Convent in St. James Parish. Just across the street and on the other side of the levee, the Mississippi River makes its way through the neighborhood, tracing a line through Cancer Alley. Washington lives just one lane over on land originally purchased in 1874 by her great-great-great-grandmother Harriet Jones, who had formerly been enslaved at a nearby plantation. 

LeBoeuf is hunched over her hands, visibly tired, and impatient when I arrive. In 2023, at the age of 72, she was diagnosed with liver cancer for which she receives regular chemotherapy. 

In a 2003 report, the National Academy of Public Administration found that cancer rates in Cancer Alley were significantly higher than in the rest of Louisiana and in the nation as a whole. It also found that Black residents had significantly higher rates of cancer and mortality than did white residents. A 2022 study found that from 2019 to 2021, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality permitted industrial emissions of pollution that were seven- to 21-times higher among Black communities than in predominantly white communities in Louisiana.

LeBoeuf doesn’t like to talk about her illness. She prefers to focus on the work that Inclusive is doing and the change they’re trying to create. But she admits that the chemo is hard and there are good days and bad days. This is a bad day. She fans out her hands before me and says, “we call it alligator skin.” When I ask what that is, she replies, “haven’t you ever seen an alligator?” Her skin is thick, blotchy, and scaly. 

Inclusive is small, but along with many allied groups across Cancer Alley, such as Rise St. James, they’ve collectively scored significant wins, beating back the Formosa petrochemical plant, an expansion by Koch industries, new industrial operations in St. John, and in their ongoing fight to impose a full moratorium on any new fossil fuel or petrochemical operations in St. James Parish. The victories are sweet but also make them and their allies targets, the women argue.

Washington and LeBoeuf firmly believe that the industry and the government (local, state, and federal) want them gone. “They just want to phase out the residents here and just have petrochemical plants here,” Washington says. 

The women cite the recent resignation of a leading ally, research scientist Kimberly Terrell, who resigned in protest from the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic after being muzzled, she says, by the university’s president due to her extensive research exposing myriad harms and inequalities of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry in Louisiana.

“The petrochemical industry and our captured politicians hate the law clinic because we’re winning and they hate that,” Anne Rolfes, Executive Director of Louisiana Bucket Brigade, tells me.

“They want you to leave. They want you to be disgusted and not know where to go, what to do, how to do it. All those things work for them,” adds LeBoeuf. “We are imagining the right to clean air, clean water, the things that will make people want to stay and come back, and that doesn’t work for them.”

The Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association

About $2 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant funded Community Change Grants advancing local community-driven projects that address climate challenges and reduce pollution. These grants were not announced until December 2024, leaving much of the funding not yet obligated and at risk of being gutted by the tax bill. 

The EPA received approximately 2,700 applications, totaling over $40 billion in requested funds and nearly 2,500 requests for technical assistance under the program. The Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association in central New Orleans had hoped to be one of those recipients.

Raymond Sweet is the Climate Coordinator for the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association. Hollygrove-Dixon is a low-income community of color sandwiched between several crisscrossing highways and major thoroughfares. I meet Sweet at the Life Transformation Community Center, which has as its backyard the busy Airline Highway. 

The association is one of six community-based organizations that jointly submitted an application with the Water Wise Gulf South nonprofit organization for a $15 million grant to expand its popular climate mitigation effort (recently featured in The New York Times). The last they’d heard from EPA was that the grant was under consideration. That was before Trump’s terminations began and before his tax bill threatened to gut the entire program.

When I arrive at the community center, a youth program is underway, preparing to head out into the neighborhood to learn about local environmental stewardship. I join a group of Black women taking part in a senior program and the conversation quickly turns to flooding, as the women whip out their phones to share pictures and stories. The rains, they explain, are coming more often, heavier, the streets are continually flooding, and it is getting worse. 

“It just seems the rain is different,” says Glenda Davis, 70, a life-long Hollygrove-Dixon resident. “It comes down really heavy for an hour and our drainage systems cannot handle what’s been happening. So, I kind of stay in my house so I don’t have to deal with it.”

The actions of the fossil fuel industry are driving the climate crisis, bringing more frequent and severe storms and rising seas. “Climate change makes the roads and infrastructure decay and get brittle,” Sweet explains. Add neglect and a lack of resources for repairs, and even a simple rain can result in debilitating flooding, not only of the neighborhood streets, but also of the highway, which serves as a crucial evacuation route for the city residents, he adds.

Sweet had high hopes for his small portion of the $15 million grant, which would expand efforts already underway to implement simple, low-cost, and efficient climate adaptation techniques utilizing nature-based projects to help reduce flooding. This includes increasing green and soil space and planting trees to naturally absorb water and creating clear routes for water to flow into storm drains. “You’ve seen what we can do with little to no money,” Sweet says. 

Sweet sees the attack on environmental and climate justice by Trump and the Congress as having a clear source: “They’re targeting us because we’ve had win after win after win — and it’s just that they have been losing.”

Written with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.