EPA workers silenced while the agency cancels hundreds of grants

Supervisors have told the members of the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency throughout the country who are prohibited from communicating with concessioned partners who are supposed to supervise and monitor, according to multiple sources within the EPA and others who work directly with the agency.

And many non -profit organizations and other recipients of the EPA subsidy have frozen without accessing their federal funds without prior notice or explanation.

“I have never experienced something like this,” said Melissa Bosworth, who runs a small non -profit organization based in Denver that he had been managing an EPA prize approved by Congress last May for tribal, school and local municipalities in Mountain West.

The non -profit leaders throughout the country with subsidies and contracts of the EPA describe weeks of a communication blackout. Bosworth said his local contacts in the office of region 8 of the EPA stopped responding a few days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. She and her associated organization, the Montana State University, said they repeatedly approached their local contact point, but did not get an answer.

ABC News contacted the EPA region 8 office to comment.

Then, at the end of February, he received a formal notice that his subsidy had been fired. The purpose of the subsidy was to help cities, tribes and schools in the rural area of ​​Montana, Wyoming and Dakotas to obtain access to federal funds for projects focused on clean drinking water, disaster preparation, emission reduction and food security.

The termination notice, reviewed by ABC News, suggested that his contract could have been canceled due to the president’s executive order to close the diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“It was about helping to fight disparities in the name of small cities and rural schools,” he said. “It is often the great universities and the great institutions that have the experience to obtain funds. I am concerned about the disparity of rural Americans, the smallest tribes and communities will get worse.”

Bosworth has a child with autism, and his business partner gave birth last month to a baby with severe medical challenges. Both have been fired now.

“We thought there was a good possibility that they tried to terminate our contracts, but without any real communication, we had nothing formal to fight,” Bosworth told ABC News. “We didn’t know what was real, if we could spend money or how to ask questions. I wonder if ambiguity was part of the strategy.”

While the communication blackout seemed to be swept into multiple regional and consequent offices for subsidy recipients, it did not seem to apply to all EPA staff throughout the country.

Even before receiving the termination notice, Bosworth said he fought to access his EPA subsidy. She and dozens of other non -profit leaders from California A Tennessee said they have been frozen outside the government’s payment system, without explanation or notification.

In a regional EPA office in Philadelphia, staff members described that they were told in meetings with political appointments of the EPA based in Washington, DC, which are not yet allowed to process new awards or even communicate with the winners of the awards as late as last week. The edict occurred despite the recent judicial decisions that block the freezing of federal funds proposed by the administration.

And when EPA’s local employees pressed their regional bosses on the communications blackout, those bosses told them that they did not want to risk doing anything to endanger their work, according to multiple sources.

As part of their work advising agencies that reduce spending and reduce staff, Elon Musk and their government efficiency department have promised transparency and greater supervision on how taxpayers’ dollars are going out through the door. Experts who work in subsidy management, as well as former EPA officials, argue that lack of communication will result in the opposite: less transparency and without supervision.

“The preponderance of the evidence is that many program officers are under some type of gag order, which makes them almost impossible to do their job,” said a former EPA official under the Biden administration A ABC News. “If you care about abuse in federal spending, this makes no sense and is absurdly hypocritical.”

In general, EPA staff works in close collaboration with non -profit organizations and local government partners who have received subsidies, carrying out supervision and answer and asking questions about how government money is spent.

Rebecca Kaduru, president of the Institute of Sustainable Communities, based in Nashville, said she has lost access to the payment system at least once a week during the last month. His organization had two subsidies from the EPA until last month, when one was finished.

Gag’s effective order has left non -profit leaders, local governments and stunned and insecure tribes on how to advance the expense of EPA subsidies that were granted.

Kaduru explained the tension of the chaos of recent months.

“Do I shoot the staff because I can’t pay the payroll? But if I do, it doesn’t meet the subsidy that says I have to have staff and keep our website,” he said on the phone. “It is a very high risk for non -profit organizations.”

On Monday, the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced that the agency had decided to terminate more than 400 contracts with non -profit organizations throughout the country.

“Working hand in hand with Dux to control the overthrown federal expenditure, the EPA has saved more than $ 2 billion in taxpayers’ money,” Zeldin wrote in a statement. “It is our commitment in the EPA to be exceptional administrators of tax dollars.”

The EPA did not answer the questions about which contracts were canceled exactly or why, but it seemed that environmental justice and subsidies for community change were particularly affected in this week’s cuts.

More than 100 organizations received subsidies for community change last year, for a total of more than $ 1.6 billion, as part of the environmental justice work fund Disasters

On Tuesday, Zeldin also sent an internal memorandum to all regional administrators who said that the agency planned to eliminate all the positions of environmental justice immediately.

“With this action, the EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the structure of the personnel that will directly benefit all Americans,” said the Memo, who reviewed ABC News.

Many non -profit leaders who received termination warnings in recent weeks expressed their frustration that they were not given the opportunity to explain their work and said that savings, in their opinion, were exaggerated. The news occurs when the agency leaders were told to write plans with a deadline for this week to obtain more personnel reductions.

In terms of savings, in a recent publication, Zeldin said he saved taxpayers to more than $ 12 million canceling the contract with the Kaduru organization, for example. However, in reality, it was A subsidy of $ 8 millionWith more than half already spent.

Speaking to a joint session of Congress last week, Trump said his administration wants to focus on pollutants, saying: “Our goal is to take toxins from our environment, the poisons of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.”

Both the current staff of the professional EPA and the non -profit partners said that the cuts and the closure of the Environmental Justice offices will make this work more.

“I think it is a shame that they are not investigating what we do, asking what we really do,” Kaduru said. “It is a pity because these particular environmental justice programs are really good programs, and I think there is an unfortunate misunderstanding about what environmental justice [is]”