This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
A few weeks ago, I visited Jim Lively at his family’s local food market near the village of Empire, just minutes from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.
He wants to install rooftop solar panels on the market’s roof. Those panels could help power the RV campground they want to open next to the market and offset other electricity bills.
But even though Lively was awarded a $39,696 grant for the project through a U.S. Department of Agriculture program called the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, he’s not sure if he’ll be able to get the solar panels he wants. As one of thousands of grant awardees across the country, Lively was banking on that money to cover half the cost of the solar project.
Within President Donald Trump’s first few days in office, he issued a set of executive orders intended to crack down on government initiatives geared toward addressing climate change, improving environmental justice, and supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Amidst the now-familiar wave of fluctuations and uncertainty for farmers and business owners who had been counting on funding from various programs, Lively was told that the funding for REAP had been paused.
Last week, he got a welcome update: The money was now unfrozen.
On March 25, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will release grant money through REAP and two other clean energy programs partly supported by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. But there appeared to be some fine print.
In the announcement, the USDA invited grant and loan recipients to voluntarily revise their proposals to align with Trump’s executive order by “eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals.”
In an email, a USDA spokesperson said that people who had already been awarded funding could voluntarily “review and revise” their plans within 30 days to more closely align with the Trump administration’s executive order. If recipients confirm in writing that they don’t want to change anything about their proposals, the USDA said “processing” for their projects would continue immediately. If recipients don’t communicate with the USDA, “disbursements and other actions will resume after the 30 days,” according to the statement.
But many questions remain, and the agency did not address Grist’s requests for clarification.
For instance, the agency did not offer specifics about the timeline for already-approved projects to actually receive funds; whether or not the agency will open new application periods; whether the funding announcement and invitation to revise apply to REAP grants, loans, or both; and whether the announcement applies to future REAP applications.
Perhaps most crucially, it is also not clear what the agency means by “processing”: Will those who choose not to change their applications still receive the money they’d been awarded or will their proposals be subjected to another review process? The phrase “other actions” has many observers worried.
My Grist colleague Ayurella Horn-Muller heard from some of them.
“I know there are folks that were awarded solar grants, that are wondering, ‘Does this even fall in line anymore? Because we know that the administration is keen more on fossil fuels,” said Rebecca Wolf, a senior food policy analyst with the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. “So there’s just a ton of that type of, ‘What does this actually mean?’”
What’s more, Wolf fears that this may only be the start of such so-called “open requests” issued by the agency to those waiting on paused funds.
Meanwhile, Mike Lavender, the policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, doesn’t expect to see the request bar farmers and businesses from receiving the money they are due, but acknowledges that “anything is possible with this USDA.”
So back to Jim Lively, who owns the market in Empire.
When he asked USDA staff for clarification, he said his contact “essentially seemed to agree that, you know, all of these projects are technical equipment projects. There's no DEI in them, so we should be fine."
For his part, Lively has decided to wait out the 30-day period rather than change any language.
“It’s just a solar equipment installation project. There was no DEIA anything in there. So I don’t really think I need to make any changes,” he said. “We may just take our chances, leave things as they are, and hopefully we get a funding award announcement at the end of the month.”
Read the full story on Grist.
