Pennsylvania’s environmental and climate-related programs have lost hundreds of millions of federal dollars as part of a wide-ranging funding freeze imposed by President Donald Trump and his department heads, Gov. Josh Shapiro said on Thursday in a lawsuit asking a federal court to declare the cuts illegal.
Multiple states have already sued over the blocked funding, drawing orders to temporarily lift the freeze. On Monday, a judge in a case involving 22 states and Washington, D.C., ruled that the Trump administration was defying one of those temporary restraining orders.
The Shapiro administration said in the latest lawsuit that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other parts of the Trump administration do not have the legal authority to cut funding authorized by Congress.
The suit, filed in federal court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, urged the court to rule that various federal agencies acted unconstitutionally and order the federal government to end the funding freeze.
“Governor Shapiro and the Commonwealth Agencies bring this action to restore law and order by preventing the federal agency defendants from violating statutes under which billions in federal funds have been authorized, appropriated and obligated to Pennsylvania agencies,” said the 38-page complaint.
It accused the Trump administration of breaking the law by freezing the funds. “No statute, regulation or anything else gives any federal agency power to unilaterally refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds that have already been committed to Pennsylvania merely because the agency (or even the President) has policy disagreements with the appropriations,” the complaint said.
On Jan. 28, Pennsylvania’s DEP received an email from the EPA saying that it had paused all funding relating to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, implementing an executive order from Trump on “Unleashing American Energy.” The email did not identify which funding would be paused, or on what legal authority it acted, the complaint said.
As of Feb. 12, $1.2 billion in federal funding that was due to be paid to Pennsylvania agencies was “frozen” and another $900 million is subject to an unspecified federal review, and so is classed as “restricted,” said Kayla Anderson, a spokeswoman for the Democratic governor.
The withheld funding includes $800 million to provide grants for clean-water infrastructure, and almost $400 million for a program that would allow manufacturing and industrial companies to reduce their greenhouse gas pollution.
The funding also includes more than $3 billion to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection over a 15-year period for remediating abandoned mines over some 24,000 acres, and for maintaining public water systems that treat toxic runoff from the sites.
Among other frozen funding to the state is money for programs that have been funded in prior years. For example, the Climate Pollution Reduction Planning Grant provides more than $396 million to the DEP but that item has been frozen, according to Shapiro’s office. The cuts also suspend, pending federal review, a variety of efforts including a program, worth $127 million that helps people make their homes more efficient and cut energy costs.
The freeze blocks state agencies from withdrawing money from federal accounts. That’s resulted in debts for ongoing projects that cannot be reimbursed, the lawsuit said. Although agencies have some reserves to cover small debts, the size of the federal spending freeze “will far exceed those reserves,” it said.
“We cannot afford to give in to the radical Trump agenda at the expense of our environment, our workers or our economy.”
— Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania
Harrison Fields, a Trump spokesman, said in a statement: “Radical leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump to advance his wildly popular agenda.”
Trump won 49.8 percent of the popular vote.
Environmental groups welcomed Shapiro’s suit and condemned Trump’s spending freeze. “The deliberate withholding of these congressionally authorized investments is already causing real harm to real people,” Evergreen Action, a nonprofit that advocates for action to counter climate change, said in a statement. “Critical programs to lower electricity costs for families and businesses through solar and energy efficiency updates are being stalled.”
Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania said the lawsuit represents resistance against the spending freeze. “We cannot afford to give in to the radical Trump agenda at the expense of our environment, our workers or our economy,” the nonprofit said in a statement.
The Ohio River Valley Institute, a research nonprofit that analyzes the economy of western Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, said at least 6,000 jobs are at risk from the withdrawal of federal funding for the state’s industrial decarbonization program. Federal funding to the state also supports 1,000 jobs for the program to clean up abandoned mines and 900 jobs to plug old oil and gas wells, the group said. Funding cuts to energy-efficiency programs will also cost jobs, it added.
“By blocking these funds, the Trump administration is putting policies before people, compromising real progress to improve the lives of hardworking families,” Joanne Kilgour, the Ohio River Valley Institute’s executive director, said in a statement. She called for an immediate end to this “reckless freeze.”
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