States across the country are unable to access hundreds of millions of federal dollars for energy upgrades, disaster resilience, infrastructure and environmental cleanup, officials told NOTUS.
President Donald Trump has pledged to undo the last administration’s justice and equity policies, which are deeply embedded in the money states get for energy and environmental programs. The continued blockade reflects a month of deep uncertainty over how far Trump can go to undo existing agreements in order to meet that promise.
The Trump administration is keeping states and local governments from accessing billions of approved and granted dollars for a wide swath of federal funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act. A federal circuit-court judge on Jan. 31 ordered the administration to release the frozen funds, and then did so again in a clarifying enforcement order on Feb. 10, but state officials in Alaska, Arizona and Pennsylvania told NOTUS that the administration has still not released them.