Federal funding to Pennsylvania for climate-related and other programs will be restored, Gov. Josh Shapiro said, reversing a Trump administration freeze after lawsuits by Pennsylvania and almost two dozen other states.
Shapiro sued the Trump administration Feb. 13 in federal court over the funding freeze, arguing that it had illegally halted or subjected to an unspecified review $2.1 billion in federal funds that had been committed to Pennsylvania after being approved by Congress.
The frozen funds included money for remediating Pennsylvania’s many abandoned mines, for helping the state reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and for reducing energy costs for homeowners. The freeze also prompted separate legal action by 22 other states and the District of Columbia, leading a federal judge in Rhode Island to order the administration to lift its spending ban.
Federal money to Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection that had been frozen includes $369.1 million for a program to reduce climate pollution under the Inflation Reduction Act, the flagship climate law passed by Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden. The agency had also been subject to an unspecified restriction in $264 million of funding for a restoration program for abandoned wells whose original owners had gone out of business or could not be found. Other environmental programs had also been subject to the funding freeze.
Shapiro said all the funds specified by the Pennsylvania lawsuit had been unfrozen and would be supplied to state agencies as originally planned.
“Every dollar that we identified at the filing of our lawsuit is currently unfrozen, and once again accessible to all Pennsylvania state agencies,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “With the funding resumed, we will now resume critical programs and infrastructure programs that have been jeopardized by this illegal freeze.”
Neither the White House nor the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency immediately responded to requests for comment.
After the funding was frozen in late January, Shapiro said he first tried to avoid legal action by talking with Trump administration officials to try to get the funds flowing again. He said those talks led to some progress but the funds remained tied up weeks later, in defiance of multiple court orders to release them.
The first-term Democratic governor declined to say what had led the Trump administration to release the funds, saying only that he had been “direct” with administration officials when he met them at the White House on Friday. “When you’re in the room and directly engaging in that way, those conversations need to remain private,” he said, in answer to a question at the news conference.
“As a result of that direct engagement last week, our funding is now unfrozen. They are now following the law,” he said.
Although the funding specified by the lawsuit is now restored, other federally funded parts of the DEP budget are still “at risk,” warned David Hess, a former DEP secretary who now writes an environmental newsletter.
“Unfreezing the funds that were specifically mentioned in the lawsuit was a good thing but that certainly doesn’t end the chaos,” he said. “We’re playing a version of ‘whack-a-mole’ here as different issues pop up.”
Environmental programs such as those on air and water quality, which are operated by the state on behalf of the federal government, were not part of Shapiro’s lawsuit and could face cuts from the Trump administration, Hess said. He estimated those programs are worth around $50 million a year to the DEP.
“Those federal funds are still at risk, and it causes tremendous uncertainty in how those programs are going to be run until that risk is cleared up,” he said.
Despite the release of the funds, the Shapiro administration will not drop the lawsuit until it’s formally concluded, said Shapiro’s spokesman, Manuel Bonder. “The lawsuit Governor Shapiro filed will move forward until we obtain a final judgment or binding agreement requiring the Trump Administration to comply with its legal obligations,” Bonder said in a statement.
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