Environmental groups say Trump administration violated their free-speech rights

Source: NPR

April 23, 2025 7:47 AM ET


Scott Vlaun has been working with his school district in western Maine to cut back how much energy it uses and helping his town come up with a plan to deal with climate threats from things like rising temperatures and worsening floods. It's a conservative part of the state where incomes are well below the national average. So, Vlaun says it was a big deal when his nonprofit got federal funding under the Biden administration to assist in lowering people's energy bills and preparing communities for more extreme weather.

"A lot of the work we do is about building resilience," says Vlaun, executive director of the Center for an Ecology-Based Economy in Norway, Maine, a town of about 5,000 that was once known as the Snowshoe Capital of the World. "But we're also trying to build energy equity, so that the working poor here can afford their electricity." Then President Trump took office, and the aid disappeared. At the end of March, the Environmental Protection Agency told Vlaun that a grant to his organization had been terminated. "The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities," the agency said in a letter that was shared with NPR.

It's one of scores of funding agreements Congress earlier approved for climate and environmental initiatives that have been frozen or cancelled by the Trump administration. Environmental justice projects like Vlaun's, which are aimed at helping low-income and disadvantaged communities, have been hit especially hard. Federal judges have intervened, ordering the Trump administration to release promised funds. A lot of the legal arguments so far have revolved around whether the administration violated federal regulations and the Constitution's separation of powers when it withheld money that Congress appropriated.

But a lawsuit filed recently in federal court in South Carolina goes further. A group of nonprofits and municipalities alleges the Trump administration violated their free-speech rights by targeting them over language in their grant documents, including words like "equity" and "socioeconomic," and trying to force them to use different language. They're not alone: Harvard University filed suit Monday arguing that a federal funding freeze threatens its First Amendment rights. "You can't use government funding to coerce speech," says Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represents nonprofits in the South Carolina lawsuit.


Read more: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/23/nx-s1-5369362/trump-funding-freeze-climate-environmental-justice-free-speech