13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Review the EPA grants program for political affiliation

Partially done

Printed page 421 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Reviewing the grants program to ensure that taxpayer funds go to organizations focused on tangible environmental improvements free from political affiliation.”

What has happened

Mar 10, 2025 Partially done
EPA reviewed its grants and canceled what the review found. Working with the Department of Government Efficiency, the agency canceled more than 400 grants across nine programs in a single round — $1.7 billion — on top of three earlier rounds, and named political advocacy as the reason: environmental justice money, the Administrator said, had been "used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists". What has not been published is any standing test that screens future awards for tangible environmental improvement, which is what the Quote asks the review to produce.
- EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin Cancels 400+ Grants in 4th Round of Cuts with DOGE, Saving Americans More than $1.7B
  Primary Executive branch Mar 10, 2025
- EPA Launches Biggest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History (2025-03-12) — 31 actions including terminating the agency's environmental justice and DEI arms
  Primary Executive branch Mar 12, 2025

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The grant review is the same instrument as #1055; the two Quotes ask different things of it. This one asks for a review of the program; #1055 asks for advocacy-group grants to stop.
partial and not done because no allowlisted EPA statement says the review of the grants program is finished or that a standing test now screens applicants. The cancellations are the review’s output, not the review’s completion.
The terminated environmental-justice grants are being litigated (for example Justice Climate Fund v. EPA, D.D.C. 1:25-cv-00938); the dockets are leads, not Evidence.
EO 14332 grant-process sweep (2026-09-29). The object matches: a review of EPA’s grants program is review of the agency’s awards. The item is partial on EPA’s own 2025 review and cancellations, so the order is a note. No EPA instrument applying a standing test was found (the reading is on #1199). The Office of Water NOFO EPA-OW-OWM-26-03 (posted 2026-08-19) asks that efforts “aim for measurable results and clearly show tangible benefits for water systems and communities”. That is close to the Quote’s “tangible environmental improvements”, but it is one program’s language and not a screen across the grants program. Status unchanged.

Action: restrict
Object: EPA grants program
ID: 1049