Ira Vandever received an email from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in mid-May stating that his grant funds for addressing pollution on the Navajo Nation were rescinded. For years, Vandever independently grew hemp on an acre of land in the Four Corners region of New Mexico. 

Hemp is known to be “magical” because of the plant’s capacity to pull chemicals from the soil as it grows, healing the ecosystem from toxic chemicals and lessening the region’s pollution burden. Diné and residents of the Navajo Nation have to contend with pollution from decades of military and industrial operations that allowed cadmium, uranium, arsenic, and methane to leach into land and air. Vandever told Prism that per year, his one acre of hemp draws down four tons of the harmful greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

In 2024, Vandever applied for EPA funding to sustain and expand this work. He wanted to acquire and plant an additional acre of land, install air monitoring, and launch further research and development into the uses and benefits of hemp. Vandever told Prism that he received technical assistance from government contractors to support the application process and that they praised his enterprising work, which made him think the funding was guaranteed. The grant would have relieved the pressure from years of going it alone. 

Vandever said he knew “never to trust the EPA because I’m Native American. I’m Navajo.”

“I was doing it all with my own money,” Vandever said. Program funding falling by the wayside isn’t just disappointing, it’s “disgusting,” he added. Looking back, Vandever said he knew “never to trust the EPA because I’m Native American. I’m Navajo.”

Vandever’s experience isn’t unique. The Trump administration’s EPA has canceled $2.7 billion in funding for environmental justice, research, and other projects aimed at reducing the carbon impact of construction materials, according to the nonprofit investigative news outlet Floodlight. In many cases, the EPA canceled whole swaths of grants based on the category, such as those belonging to the congressionally approved Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program, which was a component of the Biden administration’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that spent billions on climate programs, renewable energy, and health care expansion, among other projects. 

Many of the canceled grants would have funded projects on tribal lands aimed at healing and restoring soil and water systems from pollution—pollution that came as a result of government operations. While leaders on these projects claim that they’ll continue with their work despite the lack of funding, the administration’s rescission affects the pace at which groups can pursue remediation projects. Because rescinded funds were appropriated by Congress, project leaders say that the administration’s actions are both unconstitutional and a dereliction of the trust responsibility the federal government maintains with tribal nations. This trust responsibility stems from nearly 200 years of judicial findings affirming unique moral and legal obligations owed to tribes by the federal government. On June 25, a coalition of environmental groups affected by the funding cuts filed a class-action lawsuit against the EPA. 

In Maine, remediation work taking place on the Mi’kmaq Nation has gone through a back-and-forth with the Trump administration’s EPA. Funding was terminated in May and restored for the tribe at the end of June, along with the Passamaquoddy Tribe’s research funding.

In 2009, the Department of the Interior took into trust 600 acres of the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone, Maine, on behalf of the Aroostook Band of Micmac Indians. The Loring Air Force base has been on the Superfund National Priorities List for cleanup since 1990, though federal records say the government is still in the process of studying the extent of the pollution. The EPA awarded the Mi’kmaq Nation $1.6 million last year to remediate the property’s soil from polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). 

Also known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a class of chemicals developed by the corporations DuPont and 3M that are harmful to human health at any level of exposure. Despite their toxicity, PFAS are virtually unregulated by the federal government. The chemical industry was aware of the harms of PFAS as early as 1970 and later influenced federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to downplay their harm. Against the backdrop of funding cuts, the Trump administration is working to undercut the EPA’s standard on exposure limits for four of the six most common types of PFAS.

Over time, PFAS exposure can impact the thyroid system, liver function, kidney function, and lead to multiple types of cancers, said Alissa Cordner, an associate professor of sociology at Whitman College who studies perfluorinated chemicals. Cordner told Prism that nearly every person who has ever been tested for exposure has measurable PFAS in their body. Estimates say that roughly 60% of people have PFAS-contaminated drinking water, with others facing exposure from contaminated household products, food, and more. 

As the Mi’kmaq Nation knows, “some of the most contaminated sites are the U.S. military facilities,” Cordner said. PFAS are a main component of firefighting foam that’s used as a retardant for oil-based fires. While federal agencies have spent decades and millions of dollars studying the issue of PFAS contamination, the Mi’kmaq Nation was actually addressing pollution on Loring Air Force Base. 

A collaborative research group led by the Mi’kmaq Nation found that hemp successfully removed PFAS from the soil on a portion of the 600 acres held in trust. 

“The money gave us the opportunity to expand what we were doing and get data in real time,” said Chelli Stanley, the founder of Upland Grassroots, an environmental nonprofit working with the Mi’kmaq Nation on hemp-based land restoration through a process known as phytoremediation. 

Stanley said that grant funding would allow the research team to adapt methodology to real-time testing results, making use of expensive equipment the team did not previously have access to. The grant was “pretty huge for us,” Stanley said in an interview in early June. “We’ve been doing the work without any money for several years.”

While the status of the funding remained uncertain, the research team  opted to freeze samples in the hope that grants would be restored, which they were in late June.

In canceling the grants, the Trump administration claimed that projects were no longer in line with the priorities of the environmental agency, despite heads of other agencies claiming that addressing public health concerns posed by toxic substances remained the administration’s Make America Healthy Again priority. Central to the EPA’s reasoning for the recent wave of grant cancellations was that the projects constituted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

“Maybe the Biden-Harris Administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission including treating tribes and Alaska Natives as such,” an EPA spokesperson told Prism via email. “The Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes, and communities to support projects that advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.” 

More than 600 staff at the EPA have signed an open letter addressed to the agency’s head, Lee Zeldin, imploring him to consider the ways that funding cuts will “reverberate for generations to come.” The letter read: “Canceling environmental justice programs is not cutting waste; it is failing to serve the American people.”

Additionally, granting tribes and affiliated groups adequate funding to address chronic and systemic pollution isn’t DEI, clarified Monte Mills, director of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington School of Law. 

“Commitment to supporting tribal sovereignty is not an ideological matter,” Mills said. He told Prism that the federal government maintains treaties and trust obligations with tribal nations. This government-to-government relationship between the two has existed long before “DEI” initiatives came about or were subject to legislative attack. 

According to Mills, attacks on DEI or environmental justice initiatives have negatively impacted tribal communities and governments. But to see tribal issues or pollution of tribal land simply as an issue of racial justice oversimplifies nearly 200 years of judicial proceedings establishing a unique legal relationship between tribes and the federal government “even before the United States was founded,” Mills said.

In late June, 23 organizations, tribes, and municipal groups sued the EPA for its cancellation of the grants “en masse” without deference to the law that established the grant program. The cancellation “has harmed and continues to harm … communities across the country who are now unable to address environmental harms through these community-driven environmental, climate, and public health projects.” The plaintiffs await certification of the class action from the District Court in Washington, D.C. 

Correction, July 23, 2025: This story has been updated to include that in late June, the EPA restored funding for hemp remediation work on the Mi’kmaq Nation in Maine, which had been terminated in May. The Passamaquoddy Tribe also regained their research funding.

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor