When Jill Baker’s email pinged late on a Wednesday night in early April, she had no idea that her role as the director for Humanities Montana was about to fundamentally change.

“I received the letter from DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] through the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities at 10:25 pm on Wednesday, April 2. The letter was dated April 2, and our grant was terminated April 2, so there wasn’t even an opportunity to close out our grant and to be reimbursed for expenses that had happened prior to April 2,” Baker told the Daily Yonder in an interview.

Humanities Montana is one of 56 regional humanities organizations that bring humanities programs to underresourced communities including in rural areas. In 2024, over 17,000 people attended a Humanities Montana program, with more than half residing in a rural county.

Funding was cut to all 56 regional humanities organizations, as well as the national office in Washington, DC. State humanities across the country are scrambling to continue running their programs. In Alaska, a note on their program’s website states, “Late on the night of April 2, the Alaska Humanities Forum received a letter from DOGE officials informing them that their NEH operating grant approved by Congress had been illegally terminated effective immediately.”  Wisconsin Humanities also has an announcement on its website, noting that “the loss of NEH funding will likely result in Wisconsin Humanities closing its doors soon.” 

Humanities Montana has brought experts in history, journalism, and poetry to speak to rural Montanans who would otherwise struggle to access such programs. Through their Montana Conversations program, they also bring trained facilitators to lead workshops and conversations that strengthen community resilience.

“Our mission is to bring untold stories that can help bring people together and find the humanity in one another,” Baker said. “In this moment, that’s a real challenge in and of itself. My worry is that without the public humanities, our divides will grow, we’ll have less opportunities to gather together and have simple civic conversations, to learn from one another.”

Humanities Montana has received general operating support grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for over 50 years. The NEH funding provided most of their operating budget; in 2023, the NEH made up 80.9% of their $1,011,229 budget.

The sudden cut in funding meant they had to cancel all scheduled programs for the year immediately. Like with most federal funding, Humanities Montana needed to spend the allocated money and then submit invoices to be reimbursed. The way their funding was cut meant that they will not be compensated for the funds they have already spent, and they won’t be able to allot any more money for programs going forward.

“We need to pivot pretty quickly to private fundraising, and that changes our business model completely. So we’re pausing those programs and making a plan to move forward in a different landscape,” Baker said.

On With the Program

One person who isn’t ready to pause is the current Montana Poet Laureate and award-winning Métis storyteller, Chris La Tray. He is committed to attending all the events he had been scheduled for through Humanities Montana and has since added even more, regardless of the organization’s ability to pay. He has been working to raise the money through private donations.

La Tray, an enrolled member of the Little Shell tribe of Chippewa Indians, wasn’t surprised by the funding cuts, even if he was angry about them. 

“The way those grants work, it’s like what they learned writing treaties with Indian tribes; just because you say you’re going to do something doesn’t mean you have to. It’s a pretty cruel kind of bait and switch,”  La Tray told the Daily Yonder.

A poet and the author of Becoming Little Shell, a memoir about his journey to embracing his Indigenous heritage, La Tray’s commitment to continuing his program is borne from seeing firsthand how important his work is, especially in rural areas.

“When I started working with Humanities, I said, let’s make the list of all the little places that nobody ever goes to, and let’s make going there a priority,” La Tray said.

Since announcing that he planned to continue his programming regardless of payment, La Tray has been working with schools and community centers to find alternative ways to fund his work, finding private donors who have offered to step in.

For La Tray, the work is just too important to stop. “There’s a little school just on the eastern edge of the Fort Belknap Reservation who asked me to come do the commencement address at their high school graduation, and there’s six graduating seniors,” he said. “They have eighth-grade and kindergarten graduates as part of this. It’s not even 20 kids, and it’s a nine-hour drive away from me. And they started asking, right as Humanities was collapsing, and how am I not going to do that, you know?”

With more than half his work taking place in rural Montana, La Tray and Bake believe these cuts will hit folks in rural areas the hardest. 

“For example, one of the places that we have had speakers is Petroleum County, population 500 in the whole county. Humanities Montana speaker, Mary Jane Bradbury, did her program talking about the history of Nancy Russell, and 80 people showed up in a county that has 500 people. I just think that shows the power of the humanities to bring people together, to gather, to share the hunger to learn,”  Baker said.

Samantha French, the director of the Blaine County Museum in Chinook, Montana, is worried about losing such a valuable resource for her community.

“It’s so affordable to go through the speakers bureau, it’s a $75 copay. Humanities Montana funded all of the speakers’ other expenses, their mileage, their lodging, and that’s not something that’s feasible to do for a lot of small museums,” French said.

The Blaine County Museum holds its speaker series in the winter as a way to build community during the dark months. French said that it brings people from all walks of life, and they typically have between 15 and 30 attendees on a weekday night, out of a population of 1,200.

That’s where Humanities Montana programs were just invaluable, because they appealed to a really broad breadth of age groups and kinds of people,” French said. Humanities Montana also gave the museum $500 to fund its book club, which brought people to the museum and library with which neither institution had previously interacted with. After the programming was finished, the books were turned into kits that can be borrowed by other libraries in the state.

French recognizes the effects losing this program will have on Chinook and other rural Montanans. “There’s already so little here, and unfortunately, with the nature of these federal cutbacks, it really does impact the people who are the most disadvantaged,” she said. 

“Rural people in rural communities are disadvantaged. We really have very few resources. We have very little access to transportation, healthcare, and healthy food. We truly need what was there. So yeah, it makes a big impact.”

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The post Cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities Hit Rural Montana, Other States Hard appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT

In March, Gila River took out 10,000 acre-feet of their allotted water from Lake Mead after the Trump administration’s Unleashing American Energy executive order froze money for any program related to the Inflation Reduction Act. The act, which Congress passed during the Biden Administration in 2022, allocated money for tribes and states in exchange for giving up some of their shares of Colorado River water.

The Trump administration later unfroze the Inflation Reduction Act funds that would be used for water conservation projects and to build canals. The act allocated around $4 billion to compensate tribes, states and other organizations to not take water out of the Colorado River to use to generate revenue like crops.

Gila River Governor Stephen Roe Lewis wrote a letter to the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum on Feb. 11 before removing Colorado River water from Lake Mead.

“We have given the department every opportunity to avoid what could be a calamitous break in our longstanding partnership, with terrible consequences for the entire basin,” he said.

If water levels continue dropping, hydroelectric dams on the Colorado River will not be able to generate electricity. But the compensation to not take water out of the river has been seen as a short-term solution by many experts, including Mark Squillace, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in natural resource law.

“My concern is that the Biden administration seemed to be focused on short-term buyouts of water consumption,” he said. “I just don’t think that kind of approach is sustainable. What we need on the Colorado River are permanent reductions in consumption, and so spending a lot of money to temporarily buy out the rights of people to use all of their water, right, is just not something that is going to solve the problem.”

Thirty tribes have rights to the Colorado River. The river is a resource, but for the Zuni Pueblo it is the source of life.

“For the Zuni people, the Colorado River is really important because the river and the Grand Canyon are our homeland. That’s where the Zunis emerged,” said Councilman of Zuni Pueblo Edward Wemytewa.

The Colorado River has important cultural significance to each tribe that has water rights to it, but the Colorado River compact that outlined how the river would be divided was not drafted in consultation with tribes.

“Laws were created by the US governments, by the US agencies, and during those times, the federal government, in the name of public interest, they started delineating territories. They start creating laws about water usage, water compacts,” said Wemytewa. “Well, in those earlier years, when the laws were being developed and implemented, the Zuni was not at the table. Many Native peoples weren’t at the table.

“Under federal law, those tribes have the right to take their water, usually in priority over everybody else, because the date of priority for Indian water rights is the date of their reservations, which is typically within the 19th century,” said Squillace. “So those water rights tended to date back before other non-Indian users.

“Those are legal rights that they are entitled to. And so one of the things I’ve suggested in my article is that maybe we should think about closing down the river to new appropriations. Why are we continuing to appropriate new water rights when we have this crisis and we have early water rights from Native American tribes that are currently legal but not being utilized for a number of different reasons?” he said.

The current compact being used was created in 1922, and it divided the river into two basins – upper and lower.

Each basin was allotted no more than 7.5 million acre-feet of water per year, equaling 15 million acre-feet of water each year. Mexico was also allocated 1.5 million acre-feet a year. The amount of water the river produces was vastly overestimated at the time of the compact’s creation.

“At the time that they negotiated the compact, it was thought that there was maybe 18 million acre feet of water on an annual basis in the river, which turned out not to be true,” said Squillace.

Currently, the Colorado River is producing about 12.5 million acre-feet a year. A vast over-allocation of water has led to states battling over water and how to use it.

Squillace proposed a new Colorado River compact. It proposes to update states’ water usage laws and to bring tribal nations into the conversation.

“I’ve suggested that maybe we could come up with a new compact, which would look very different from the current compact, but would basically be an agreement among the states to modernize their water laws,” he said. “Right now we have a number of principles in the various state water laws that I think allow for, I don’t want to call them wasteful, but at least inefficient uses. We could increase our efficiency in terms of the amount of water that we use if we sort of refined what we call beneficial use. There’s a principle in western water law that you only get as much water as can be beneficially used.”

For the Zuni Pueblo, a history of strong-handed negotiations and a lack of knowledge of a government system that is not their own led to signing deals that did not benefit them.

“When there were any land settlements or water settlements, tribes were never provided attorneys.Tribes were never given a heads up, They were never given funding to educate ourselves as Indigenous peoples,” Wemytewa said. “We are stewards of the water. We find the corn seed central. The corn seed is central. In fact, our abstract name is Children of Corn because we’re farmers, we’re agricultural people. What agricultural people would give up their water rights? What agricultural people would give up their watershed? We didn’t have much choice.”

Tribes have priority over everyone else when it comes to their water rights pertaining to the Colorado River, which means they must have a voice in the conversation.

“There are 30 Native American tribes with water rights along the Colorado River. And it may be impractical to basically have all 30 tribes represented during negotiations. We’ve got seven states, two countries, 30 tribes. That would be a very difficult kind of negotiation,” he said.

“But you could certainly have some representatives. The reason it’s tricky is that not all tribes agree on the best approach here. And so it’s important that we treat individual Native American tribes as people who can have their own views that might be different from other tribes. And so how do you ensure fair representation of all the tribal views without actually putting all those tribes at the table during negotiation?”

For Wemytewa, a new compact with tribes involved is necessary.

“Today, as a tribal leader, I submit comments to federal agencies, whether it’s the National Park Service or the Bureau of Land Management or (U.S. Geological Survey). We submit our comments trying to provide guidance to the federal agencies that you have to consider that you can’t continue to open up the lands. You cannot continue to give away water, because by doing so, you continue to remove Indigenous peoples from their aboriginal lands to make room for other people, other cultures.” 

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When an outbreak of deadly tornadoes tore through the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, in December 2021, one family was slow to act, not because they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know that they should do anything.

The family of Guatemalan immigrants only spoke Spanish, so they didn’t understand the tornado alert that appeared on their cell phones in English. “I was not looking at [an information source] that told me it was going to get ugly,” Rosa, identified only by her first name, told researchers for a study on how immigrant communities responded to the warnings. 

Another alert popped up in Spanish, and Rosa and her family rushed downstairs to shelter. Ten minutes later, a tornado destroyed the second floor where they’d been. 

For at least 30 years, the National Weather Service had been providing time- and labor-intensive manual translations into Spanish. Researchers have found that even delayed translations have contributed to missed evacuations, injuries, and preventable deaths. These kinds of tragedies prompted efforts to improve the speed and scope of translating weather alerts at local, state, and national levels.

Early into the Biden administration, the agency began a series of experimental pilot projects to improve language translations of extreme weather alerts across the country. The AI translating company Lilt was behind one of them. By the end of 2023, the agency had rolled out a product using Lilt’s artificial intelligence software to automate translations of weather forecasts and warnings in Spanish and Chinese.

“By providing weather forecasts and warnings in multiple languages, NWS will improve community and individual readiness and resilience as climate change drives more extreme weather events,” Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, said in a press release announcing the 2023 launch. Since then, the service also added automatic translations into Vietnamese, French, and Samoan. The machine learning system could translate alerts in just two to three minutes — what might take a human translator an hour — said Joseph Trujillo Falcón, a researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whose work supported the program. 

And now those alerts are gone. The National Weather Service has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier. 

“Because these translations are no longer available, communities who do not understand English are significantly less safe and less aware of the hazardous weather that might be happening in their area,” said a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employee familiar with the translation project, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation. Hundreds of thousands of alerts were translated by the Lilt AI language model, the employee said.

An internal memo reviewed by Grist showed that the National Weather Service has stopped radio translations for offices in its southern region, where 77 million people live, and does not plan to revert to a previous method of translation — meaning that its broadcasts will no longer contain Spanish translations of forecasts and warnings. The move enraged some workers at local NWS offices, according to conversations relayed to the employee, as the decision not to restart radio translations was due to the workload burden as the service’s workforce faces cuts under the Trump administration.

No clear reason was given as to why the contract lapsed and the agency has discontinued its translations, the employee said. “Due to a contract lapse, NWS paused the automated language translation services for our products until further notice,” NOAA weather service spokesperson Michael Musher told Grist in a statement. Musher did not address whether the NWS plans to resume translations, nor did he address Grist’s additional requests for clarification. Lilt did not respond to a request for comment.

Fernando Rivera, a disaster sociologist at the University of Central Florida who has studied language-equity issues in emergency response, told Grist the move by the administration “is not surprising” as it’s in “the same trajectory in terms of [Trump] making English the official language.” Rivera also pointed to how, within hours of the president’s inauguration, the Trump administration shut down the Spanish-language version of the White House website. Trump’s mandate rescinded a decades-old order enacted by former President Bill Clinton that federal agencies and recipients of federal money must provide language aid to non-English speakers. 

“At the end of the day, there’s things that shouldn’t be politicized,” Rivera said.

Of the millions of people living in the U.S. who don’t speak English at home, the vast majority speak Spanish, followed by Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. Now that the contract with Lilt has lapsed, it’ll be difficult to fulfill the Federal Communications Commission’s pre-Trump ruling on January 8 that wireless providers support emergency alerts in the 13 most common languages spoken in the U.S., said Trujillo Falcón, the researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

The gap will have to be filled by doing translations by hand, or by using less accurate automated translations that can lead to confusion. Google Translate, for example, has been known to use “tornado clock” for “tornado watch” and grab the word for “hairbrush” for “brush fires” when translating English warnings to Spanish. Lilt, by contrast, trained its model specifically on weather-related terminologies to improve its accuracy.

While urban areas might have news outlets like Telemundo or Univision that could help reach Spanish-speaking audiences, rural areas don’t typically have these resources, Trujillo Falcón said: “That’s often where a lot of multilingual communities go to work in factories and on farms. They won’t have access to this life-saving information whatsoever. And so that’s what truly worries me.” 

It’s an issue even in states with a large population of Spanish speakers, like California. “It’s assumed that automatic translations of emergency information is commonplace and ubiquitous throughout California, but that’s not the case, particularly in our rural, agricultural areas where we have farmworkers and a large migrant population,” said Michael Méndez, a professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California, Irvine. 

Méndez said that Spanish speakers have been targeted by misinformation during extreme weather. A study in November found that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were more susceptible to false political narratives pertaining to natural disaster relief and other issues than those who use English-language media. The National Weather Service alerts were “an important tool for people to get the correct information, particularly now, from a trusted source that’s vetted,” Méndez said.

Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, sees it only placing a “deeper burden” on local communities and states to fill in the gaps. In the days since the weather service contract news first broke, a smattering of local organizations across the country have already announced they will be doubling down on their work offering non-English emergency information. 

But local and state disaster systems also tend to be riddled with issues concerning language access services. A Natural Hazards Center report released last year found that in hurricane hotspots like Florida, state- and county-level emergency management resources for those with limited English proficiency are scarce and inconsistent. All told, the lack of national multilingual emergency weather alerts “will have pretty deep ripple effects,” said Liebman. “It’s a life or death impact.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Millions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. on Apr 14, 2025.

School kids in rural Maine have benefited from a national U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) program bringing local produce, including seafood and Maine-grown grains, to school cafeterias.

Those same rural kids and their families will likely face an increase in food insecurity as the USDA notified states that they are ending the Local Foods for Schools (LFS) program, a national pandemic-era program that provided $660 million for schools to purchase food from local farmers and producers in all fifty states, US territories, and for federally recognized tribes.

This change comes at a time when the USDA is finalizing changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), including adding work requirements, limiting work exemptions, and reducing the benefit amounts, all of which would disproportionately affect rural Americans.

Full Plates, Full Potential is a food advocacy and implementation organization in Maine. They support schools and other organizations that provide food to kids through federal nutrition programs, including supporting schools in applying for federal funds to purchase local foods. 

“A lot of our work in Maine has involved ‘how on earth are we going to feed our kids?’,” Anna Korsen, the Policy and Program Director for nonprofit Full Plates, Full Potential, said.

Maine provides free lunches to all students, not just those who qualify as low-income, making the loss of $2.8 million in federal funding for local food purchasing hit the state especially hard. 

As most of Maine falls within USDA’s rural designation, most of Maine’s kids and schools are in rural communities. 

In Maine, over 179,000  people are enrolled in SNAP, and 34% of SNAP recipient households in Maine include children. With Maine being a primarily rural state, it’s no surprise that 1 in 7 rural households participate in SNAP. In fact, 14.2% of rural Maine households use SNAP benefits, and 20.5% of those are families with Children. Maine also has the highest rate of childhood food insecurity in New England, with 1 in 5 kids unsure of where their next meal will come from. 

“For kids who are experiencing food insecurity, the only reliable meals that they have in a day are often breakfast and lunch. Those are also the healthiest meals that they have access to. So when the federal government pulls this funding, that’s going to impact the nutrition and quality of the meals that those kids are receiving,” Korsen said.

It isn’t just students who will suffer. The funding cut will also affect Maine’s agricultural industry, as the funds specifically went to purchase produce from farms that partnered with schools. 

“Schools are often the biggest restaurant in a community, especially in rural areas in states like Maine. And so, you know, that’s going to have a big impact on these small farms,” Korsen said.

Full Plates is taking steps to ensure Maine decision-makers understand how important these programs are to kids, families, schools, and farms. They’re also thinking about things like mutual aid, though Korsen admits it will be tough to fill a funding gap that could be billions of dollars without federal support.

Allison Leavitt, the nutrition director for Lisbon Schools in southeastern Maine, has seen benefits from the assistance received through the LFS program. She also noted that in the current economy, they could use more federal help to make their food, not less.

“I’ve already blown through what was budgeted for my regular food allowance as of today, and we have until June to keep feeding kids,” Leavitt said. “Anybody that goes to the grocery store knows that everything is more expensive. So every single little last dollar that we could have, and especially if we can keep it in the local economy, is very much needed.”

The cuts to the LSF program come at a particularly stressful time for rural families. The House GOP has proposed 230 billion in cuts to SNAP benefits in addition to cuts already made to the LSF program. 

“We are very concerned that millions of people could be at risk of losing some or all of the food benefits that they need to put food on the table,” Katie Bergh, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said.

SNAP helps 42.2 million Americans, or roughly one in eight people in this country, afford groceries, and although the average benefit is only about $6.16 per day right now, it has a huge effect on food security, particularly in rural areas. 

In 2023,14.3% of rural households participated in SNAP compared to 11.9% in metropolitan areas, Bergh told the Yonder. In addition to SNAP’s direct benefits to the families who need to put food on the table, it also acts as an important economic stimulus. The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service estimated that every additional dollar spent on SNAP in a weak economy generates $1.54 in economic activity. 

“It is highly effective at reducing food insecurity, and poverty research has linked participation to better health, improved educational attainment, better labor market outcomes, particularly for people who participate in SNAP as children,” Bergh said. 

“Those food benefits are federal dollars that go directly to low-income families who then spend them at local grocery stores in their communities. And that’s not only generating revenues for the local grocery store, it’s also supporting jobs throughout the entire food supply chain,” she said.

“School meals are often the most reliable and nutritious meals available to food-insecure kids, so the termination of LFS will negatively impact the quality of food being served to food-insecure children,” according to Korsen. 

According to Bergh, everyone involved with emergency feeding networks agrees that charity won’t be able to fill the gap in funding. He also doesn’t think states will be able to pick up the bill.  

“The states don’t have the resources to meet those additional costs without having to make really painful trade-offs, to raise revenue or cut other programs and services that low-income families rely on.” 

The post Rural Youth Face Funding Cuts for Local Foods for Schools Program  appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

On January 27, 2025, the White House issued a late-night directive that paused federal grants and funding in order to locate and eliminate “woke” government spending. The pause seemingly included funding for public schools, such as the Farm to School Program that provided schools with locally-sourced food.

It wasn’t long before Jared Cordon, superintendent of a rural school district in Roseburg, Oregon, started receiving calls from concerned community members. “If kids can’t eat, where can I drop a check off?” they asked.

On January 29, the White House rescinded the sweeping pause, after a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration’s order. 

One funding crisis was temporarily averted. But with mounting uncertainty and anticipated cuts on the horizon, rural school administrators are working tirelessly to balance next year’s budget. They do so for the students, families, and faculty who rely on strong public schools — and for their rural communities at large, whose well-being is closely tied to the fate of their local schools.

The Perils of Public School Funding

In addition to the Trump Administration’s chaotic management of federal grants, other funding challenges loom. 

Some rural districts are already facing steep funding cliffs, as Covid-19 emergency funds phase out over the next few years. Other rural districts are set to lose over $200 million of annual federal funding due to Congress’s failure to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools Act (SRS), which helps support school districts in counties with public lands exempt from local property taxes. 

Some states experienced underperforming returns on their Public Employees Retirement System, which will require school districts to make higher payments to the system. Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states continue to push for universal school voucher programs, further diverting critical funds away from rural public schools.

Beyond these immediate funding challenges, even more drastic shifts in federal education policy are unfolding. On March 20, the President signed an executive order to facilitate the eventual closure of the Department of Education. 

Congressional action is required to legally close the department or relocate key programs like Title I funding for low-income students or IDEA funding for special education to other departments. However, the administration already took some actions to slow the department’s ability to distribute these funds by firing half of its staff. It remains unclear what additional actions Education Secretary Linda McMahon will take to further dissolve the department.

A major role of many employees at the education department is to make sure federal dollars reach the right students, said Will Ragland, a former rural public school teacher and former Department of Education employee who now researches for the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy institute.

“[Federal funding] is intended to target, by-and-large, low-income students and students with disabilities. There are also programs that directly target rural areas, including grants to ensure their transportation needs are met and that rural kids can make it to school.”

Ragland said he worries that programs could meet the same fate as USAID funding, which the White House continues to block, despite numerous federal court orders. The administration has continued to follow the conservative Project 2025 playbook, according to Ragland, which outlines a 10-year phase-out of Title I funding.

“Even though [Trump] said that [legally-protected education] funding is not going to be touched, I worry they’re going to start to phase out this funding,” Ragland said in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “I worry that they say what they need to say at any given moment, but the larger plan is to eliminate the federal role in education altogether, including the funding.”

Rural Administrators Working Overtime

This growing uncertainty puts rural school districts, which often rely more heavily on federal funding and whose smaller budgets are hit harder by reductions, at greater risk.

Rural school leaders, already working at a high capacity, are facing unpredictable finances by working overtime to create multiple contingency budgets.

Jamie Green is a superintendent at Trinity Alps Unified School District in rural northern California, which is at risk of losing $3.5 million in SRS funding. He and other rural superintendents he’s connected with put in 12- to 16-hour days when creating budgets or filling out federal grant paperwork.

“During the day you have to support your kids, your parents, your teachers, and your principals. [Budgets and grant paperwork] have to be worked on after hours,” he told the Daily Yonder. “It’s difficult, but you signed up to lead, you didn’t sign up to be a victim. You don’t make excuses to your community. We won’t make excuses.”

Oftentimes, the only way to balance the budget is by delaying essential maintenance or cutting teachers in art, vocational, or special education programs. In states like Oregon and California, this challenge is compounded by the fact that the final budget deadline arrives before schools have a clear picture of the funding they’ll have for the upcoming year.

Superintendent Cordon highlighted the importance of federal funding at a crowded February school board meeting in Roseburg, Oregon. About 12 to 13% of the district’s budget comes from the federal government, Cordon told the crowd.

“Not having federal funding would dramatically impact our ability to serve children,” he said.

Micki Hall, a former Roseburg teacher and school board member who now sits on the board’s budget committee was in attendance. For Hall, budget cuts dredge up memories from her time as an educator.

“Back in 2001 we faced a lot of budget crunches. The French teacher was laid off and they cut one of the German teachers,” she said in an interview. “It’s just frightening because it also has a chilling effect in the building. If you’re not cut, you might be moved into a different, unfamiliar position.”

Across the country, rural districts are grappling with similar challenges, forced to make tough decisions that affect not just budgets but the very education and well-being of students and their communities. 

It’s clear that the need for adequate and reliable support from state and federal governments is urgent, but superintendents like Cordon and Green — and the communities they serve — can’t afford to focus solely on problems or delay action. The buck, Green said, stops with them. The only option they have is to do the work, put in the time, and find solutions.

“Rural schools will not fail,” Green said. “We’re working as hard as we can for our students. We cannot fail.”

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The post Amid Threat of Massive Funding Cuts, Rural School Administrators Work Overtime to Balance Uncertain Budgets appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

On Tuesday, March 25, rural letter carriers from across the country gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. to rally in support of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which they said faces an increasing threat of privatization under President Donald Trump.

The rally, organized by the National Rural Letter Carriers Association (NRLCA), was attended by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle as well as postal workers from the American Postal Workers Union, National Association of Letter Carriers, and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union. The event marked the launch of the NRLCA’s National Campaign to Protect the U.S. Postal Service from Privatization, which the union said is its top priority to preserve what it calls a “critical institution that serves rural America and the country at large.”

Approximately 51.3 million rural addresses would be disproportionately impacted by privatization of the Postal Service, according to NRLCA National President Don Maston. 

It is unprofitable for private companies to deliver mail to the end of long dirt roads located 50 or 100 miles from the nearest post office, Maston said. Privatization would add surcharges to such rural deliveries, which include essential goods like prescription medications and documents like social security checks and ballots.

This is not the first time that proposed changes to the Postal Service have had disproportionate impacts on rural residents. In August 2024, plans surfaced by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to eliminate evening mail pickup times in rural and remote areas as a way to cut costs. DeJoy has since resigned as Postmaster General, raising concerns about the future direction of USPS under the Trump administration. 

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“Rural Americans rely on rural carriers,” Maston said. “In fact, the entire community relies on the rural carrier, and that sense of community would be taken away, and the disproportionately impacted group in the Postal Service would be rural carriers, rural Americans, and rural communities.”

Speakers at Tuesday’s rally called for bipartisan support for House Resolution 70, a resolution in the House of Representatives that affirms the Postal Service’s role as a federal institution and opposes privatization. Since being introduced at the end of January, the resolution has garnered 180 cosponsors. 

Representative Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) helped introduce the resolution. He told the crowd that he is working to prevent privatization of the Postal Service.

“I’ve spoken to the White House and the Speaker—I said keep your hands off,” Garbarino said. “This is a bad idea. We’re going to continue to fight for you all to make sure you get the support you need, the money you need, and the protections you need to keep your jobs.”

Garbarino is among 11 Republicans to have signed on to the resolution since it was introduced. On the Democratic side, 169 representatives have cosponsored the resolution.

A similar resolution may soon be arriving in the Senate, according to Senator Gary Peters (D-MI). At the rally, Peters said it is his goal to ensure that the postal service stays independent. He said he will be introducing a resolution in the Senate for Congress to say no to privatization.  

“Our founders understood that in order to connect a great country, you needed to have a postal service and deliver to every single address,” Peters said. “You’re not gonna get that from private companies.”

The USPS dates back to the writing of the U.S. Constitution. This summer, the institution will celebrate 250 years of operation, making it older than the country itself. Some postal workers who attended the rally said that the service piece is what distinguishes USPS from a private corporation. The Postal Service is not funded by taxpayer money—instead, the sale of stamps offers a source of revenue for the institution that subsidizes a portion of its costs.

Kirby Ricketts is an executive committeeman on the NRLCA National Board. He said that the USPS was made to be a service for the American people. He said he worries that privatization will leave rural residents without access to a reliable and affordable mail delivery.

“If it’s not cost effective to take that prescription that last mile, they’re not gonna do it,” Ricketts said. “Privatization is all about the bottom line, and we’re in it for the service.”

After the rally, more than 100 rural postal workers headed to meetings with members of Congress to ask for their support in backing the USPS. Maston said that the responsibility is on all Americans to stand up for the Postal Service to keep delivery costs down. 

“U.S. mail is not for sale—it’s not just a catchy saying, it is a reality,” Maston said. “We’ve been around 250 years and we’re going to be around another 250 years.”

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The post Rural Letter Carriers Gather in Washington, D.C. to Oppose Privatization of the U.S. Postal Service appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

The billions of dollars approved by Congress to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells have been frozen as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to government spending, creating concerns that the cleanup will be halted just as it’s getting started.

President Trump’s barrage of executive orders included a January directive called “Unleashing American Energy,” which, among other provisions, ordered that federal agencies stop distributing money appropriated by President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Trump administration titled this section of the order “Terminating the Green New Deal.” But in freezing this congressionally approved spending, the administration halted a program that paid for plugging and reclaiming so-called “orphaned” or abandoned oil and gas wells. The order stated that agencies should “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from those two Biden laws. It set a 90-day deadline, upcoming in April, for agencies to review their spending programs and make sure that they align with the Trump administration’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production.

The orphaned well program, which was modeled on a North Dakota initiative, had been widely used by oil states, including several in the West.

The program — which set aside $4.7 billion, a historically large sum, for plugging wells — was distributed to states via grants from the Department of the Interior. In January, days before Trump took office, New Mexico announced that it would be receiving $5.5 million to clean up abandoned wells in the state. California also received a $9 million grant.

California, Colorado, Montana and New Mexico had each plugged over 100 orphaned wells using the Biden funds, according to an Interior Department report in 2024. Wyoming alone plugged 1,021 wells in just one year using federal grants.

As of last fall, the U.S. government had released over half a billion dollars in grants. Wells have been plugged in the people’s front yards, in national park areas and deep in the remote Alaskan wilderness. More than $3 billion are still left to be distributed, but previously available information about the grants appears to have been removed from the Interior Department’s website.

In response to questions from High Country News, an Interior Department spokesperson said that the grant program is “under review.”

“President Trump’s decisive actions are necessary steps to eliminate bureaucratic waste and refocus our agency on its core mission: serving the American people and managing our nation’s natural resources with integrity and efficiency,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Orphaned wells negatively impact current and future oil and gas development activities and pose significant risk to national energy security and public safety.”

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

Now the future of that work is uncertain, in legal limbo alongside many of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting policies. The funding in question had already been appropriated by Congress, making it unclear that the Trump administration can indefinitely cancel it.

On March 20, more than 30 House Democrats sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, asking him to clear up the lingering confusion surrounding orphaned well funding and restart the grant program.

The funding “protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

“We have already begun to hear from IIJA funding recipients impacted by this pause who now face an uncertain future after DOI issued a stop work order on their orphaned well remediation projects,” the letter states.

The letter goes on to say that the Interior Department has issued no guidance on the funds’ status.

“We urge you to resume distribution of this Congressionally directed funding immediately,” the letter stated. “It protects our communities, cleans up our environment, and builds our economy.”

ORPHANED WELLS represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “ playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

Oil industry profits don’t pay for cleanup

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

The Biden administration’s infrastructure law was the first significant federal attempt to address the growing problem of orphaned wells across the United States, although the funding it provided paled in comparison to the scale of the problem.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Many state regulators are aware that their financial requirements for oil and gas operators are are aware of this pattern and struggle to prevent it.

Several state oil regulators stated this explicitly in a 2024 survey conducted by the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC), a quasi-governmental body that represents dozens of oil states. The documents were obtained via a records request by Fieldnotes, an industry watchdog, and shared with High Country News.

“Yes, this is the common life of a well,” regulators from Louisiana said, referring to the pattern of marginal wells being passed along to smaller companies.

Utah regulators agreed: “It is definitely a problem when wells are transferred to ‘poor’ operators.”

The plugging program was supposed to address these dysfunctional state programs, primarily by providing money. The Interior Department released its first round of grants in 2023, offering up $658 million to 26 states, including most of the oil states in the West.

The subsequent grants were intended to actually push states to fix their well-plugging programs and require that operators submit more money up front — enough to ensure that the industry and not the public ends up paying for the cost of plugging.

Known as regulatory improvement grants, these pools of funding required that states demonstrate higher financial assurance standards, increase scrutiny on well transfers, improve their plugging standards or show other reforms to their orphaned well regulatory regimes.

These grants essentially became the sole tool for the federal government to incentivize tougher state regulations. But the attempt immediately ran into headwinds: Oil states pushed back on these conditions. Some of this occurred via the IOGCC, which collaborated with the federal government on the rollout of the infrastructure law. This included initiatives to reduce orphaned well numbers, program implementation and data collection. Public documents show the inter-state commission lobbied to keep the federal guidelines as weak as possible. 

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere.”

In a meeting of the Texas Railroad Commission in May 2022, Commissioner Wayne Christian – also an appointee to the IOGCC – said that he was working to remove the requirements from the federal grants.

“I’m part of the negotiation with IOGCC on the dollars coming down,” Christian said. “The Interior Department kind of have slowed things down, because all of a sudden, surprise, surprise, they decided they wanted to tell us how to do our work. And so we’re kind of fighting back on that.”

Interior devotes billions to plugging old oil wells. Is it enough?

Regulatory improvement grants would have made available an additional $40 million per state. Now the future of those grants and the improvement incentives are in jeopardy, though some groups are challenging the legality of Trump’s decision to freeze funds that had already been appropriated by Congress and passed into law.

Several environmental groups and many Democratic states have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration, seeking to release the unspent funds from the Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, the Biden administration’s landmark spending bills.

“The Trump Administration has continued to block funds needed for our domestic energy security, transportation, and infrastructure provided under the IRA and IIJA,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement in February, after filing an injunction alongside 23 Democratic attorney generals, attempting to halt the administration’s funding cuts.

Bonta’s statement noted that the administration was blocking funding that “creates well-paying jobs while simultaneously reducing harmful pollution.”

The post Trump halts historic orphaned well-plugging program appeared first on High Country News.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.

The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy.

Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government. Others say they can’t afford to take on the projects they’d been planning unless the grant money comes through.

A Floodlight analysis shows the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients of this money reside in Trump country—congressional districts represented by Republicans.

After hearing of the USDA’s latest announcement Wednesday, Minnesota strawberry farmer Andy Petran said he suspects many previously approved projects won’t be funded. He’d been approved for a $39,625 grant to install solar panels on his farm. But like many other farmers nationally, Petran got word from the USDA earlier this year that his grant money had been put on hold.

“It’s not like any small farmer who is looking to put solar panels on their farms will be able to put a natural gas refinery or a coal refinery on the farm,” Petran said. “I don’t know what they expect me to switch to.”

Petran was counting on the benefits that solar power would bring to his farm.

After getting word in September that the USDA had approved his grant application, he expected the solar panels would not only reduce his electricity bill but allow him to sell power back to the grid. He and his wife figured the extra income would help expand their Twin Cities Berry Co. and pay down their debt more quickly.

Petran’s optimism was soon extinguished. A USDA representative told him earlier this year that the grant had been frozen.

His 15-acre farm about 40 miles north of Minneapolis operates on a razor-thin margin, Petran said, so without the grant money, he can’t afford to build the $80,000 solar project.

“Winning these grants was a contract between us and the government,” he said. “There was a level of trust there. That trust has been broken.”

In its announcement, issued Tuesday night, the USDA said grant recipients will have 30 days to review and revise their project plans to align with President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order, which prioritizes fossil fuel production and cuts federal support for renewable energy projects.

“This process gives rural electric providers and small businesses the opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals,” the USDA news release said. “… This updated guidance reflects a broader shift away from the Green New Deal.”

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the release that the new directive will give rural energy providers and small businesses a chance to “realign their projects” with Trump’s priorities.

It’s unclear what this will mean for grant recipients who’ve already spent money on renewable energy projects—or those whose planned projects have been stalled by the administration’s funding freeze.

The USDA didn’t directly answer those questions. In an email to Floodlight on Wednesday, a department spokesperson said the agency must approve any proposed changes to plans—but offered no specific guidance on what or whether changes should be made.

“Awardees that do not respond via the website will be considered as not wishing to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after 30 days,” the email said. “For awardees who respond via the website to confirm no changes, processing on their projects will resume immediately.”

IRA funding targeted

The grant funding was put on hold after an executive order issued by President Trump on his first day in office. It froze hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The law added more than $1 billion to the USDA’s 17-year-old Rural Energy for America (REAP) program.

About 6,000 REAP grants funded with IRA money have been paused and are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s executive order, according to a March 5 email from the USDA’s rural development office to the office of U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).

A lawsuit filed earlier this month challenges the legality of the freeze on IRA funding for REAP projects.

Earthjustice lawyer Hana Vizcarra, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, called the latest USDA announcement a “disingenuous stunt.”

“President Trump and Secretary Rollins can’t change the rules of the game well into the second half,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the definition of an arbitrary and capricious catch-22.”

Under the REAP grant program, farmers pay for renewable and lower carbon energy projects, then submit proof of the completed work to the USDA for reimbursement. The grants were intended to fund solar panels, wind turbines, grain dryers, irrigation upgrades and other projects, USDA data shows.

At a press conference in Atlanta on March 12, Rollins said, “If our farmers and ranchers, especially, have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole.”

But some contend the administration is unfairly making farmers jump through more hoops.

“This isn’t cutting red tape; it’s adding more,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group. “The USDA claims to deliver on commitments, but these new rules could result in awarded grants being permanently frozen.”

U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a longtime farmer and Maine Democrat who sits on the House agriculture committee, said she thinks it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to withhold grant money allocated by Congress. Beyond that, she said, it has hurt cash-strapped farmers.

“This is about farmers making ends meet,” she told Floodlight. “It’s not some ideological issue for us.”

GOP lawmakers silent

Using USDA data, Floodlight identified the top 10 congressional districts that received the most grants. They’re all represented by Republicans who have said little publicly about the funding freezes affecting thousands of their constituents. It’s impossible to tell from the USDA data which REAP grants will get paid out.

The congressional district that received the most REAP grants was Iowa’s 2nd District, in the northeastern part of the state. Farmers and business owners there got more than 300 grants from 2023 through 2025. The district is represented by U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has previously voiced support for “alternative energy strategies.”

“More than half of the energy produced in Iowa is from renewable sources, and that is something for Iowans to be very proud of,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in June 2022.

Hinson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.

The No. 2 spot for REAP grants: Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, represented by U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad. In that district, which spans southern Minnesota, more than 260 farmers and rural businesses were approved for REAP grants.

Finstad’s office did not return multiple emails and calls requesting comment. His constituents have been complaining about his silence on funding freezes. They’ve staged at least two demonstrations at his offices in Minnesota. Finstad said he held a February 26 telephone town hall joined by 3,000 people in his district.

In a February 28 letter to a constituent, Finstad said Rollins has announced that the USDA will honor contracts already signed with farmers and that he looks forward to working with the administration “to support the needs of farm country.”

Finstad is no stranger to the REAP program. Before becoming a congressman, he was the USDA’s state director of rural development for Minnesota. In that role, he was a renewable booster.

“By reducing energy costs, renewable energy helps to create opportunities for improvement elsewhere, like creating jobs,” Finstad said in a 2021 USDA press release. That has since been deleted from the agency’s website.

Rollins, meanwhile, called herself “a massive defender of fossil fuels” at her confirmation hearing, and she has expressed skepticism about the findings of climate scientists. “We know the research of CO2 being a pollutant is just not valid,” Rollins said at the Heartland Institute’s 2018 conference on energy.

She has also said that she welcomes the efforts of Elon Musk and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency team at the USDA.

Losing trust in government

Jake Rabe, a solar installer in Blairstown, Iowa, said he has put up more than 100,000 solar modules in the state since getting into the business in 2015. More than 30 of his customers have completed their installation but are awaiting frozen grant funding, he said. At least 10 more have signed the paperwork but are hesitant to begin construction. Millions of dollars worth of his business are frozen, he said.

On top of that, Rabe said, the state’s net metering policies—in which solar users get credits for any excess power they send back to the grid—are set to expire in 2026.

“I kind of feel like it may be the beginning of the end for the solar industry in Iowa with what’s going on,” said Rabe, who owns Rabe Hardware.

Despite it all, he remains a Trump supporter.

“Under the current administration, I think we’re doing things that are necessary for the betterment of the entire United States,” he said.

On March 13, Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of five farmers and three nonprofits. They’re seeking a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government’s grant commitments, saying it violated the Constitution by refusing to disburse funds allocated by Congress.

Vizcarra, the Earthjustice lawyer, said she is disturbed by the lack of concern from Congress, whose powers appear to have been usurped by the administration.

She added, “These are real people, real farmers and real organizations whose projects have impacts on communities who are left with this horrible situation with no idea of when it will end.”

One of the plaintiffs, Laura Beth Resnick, grows dahlias, zinnias and other cut flowers on a small farm about 30 miles north of Baltimore.

Florists are her customers, and demand for her flowers blooms during cold-weather holidays like Thanksgiving. Each of her three greenhouses is half the length of a football field and heating them during those months isn’t cheap, Resnick said. The power bill for Butterbee Farm often exceeds $500 a month.

So a year ago, Resnick applied for a USDA renewable energy grant, hoping to put solar panels on her barn roof—a move that she estimated would save about $5,000 a year. In August, the USDA sent word that her farm had been awarded a grant for $36,450.

The cost of installing solar panels was $72,000, she said. So she paid a solar contractor $36,000 upfront, expecting that she’d pay the rest in January when the federal grant money came in. The solar panels were installed in December.

But the federal government’s check never arrived. A February 4 email from a USDA representative said her request for reimbursement was rejected due to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders.

Resnick said she sought help from her elected representatives but got “pretty much nowhere.”

After hearing about the USDA’s announcement Wednesday, Resnick said that based on the response she’s previously gotten from the USDA, she’s not confident she will get her grant money.

“I’ve lost my trust in the USDA at this point,” she said. “Our project is complete, so we can’t change the scope of it.”

Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, said he supports the legal fight against the funding freeze.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are scamming our farmers,” Van Hollen said in a statement to Floodlight. “By illegally withholding these reimbursements for work done under federal grants, they’re breaking a promise to farmers and small businesses in Maryland and across the country.”

Renewable projects on hold

Since 2023, when IRA funding became available, the USDA has given or loaned about $21.3 billion through programs to support renewable energy in rural areas, according to a Floodlight analysis of agency data, including the REAP program.

Those grant payments were processed until January 20, when the Trump administration announced its freeze.

Trump’s decision was in line with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the U.S. government. That document called for repealing the IRA and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.”

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the administration’s move, and several lawsuits are challenging the legality of the freeze of IRA funding.

At a recent public roundtable, Maggie Bruns, CEO of the Prairie Rivers Network which supports Illinois communities’ transition to clean energy, listed REAP grants that have been held up in Illinois, where her multifaceted environmental nonprofit is based. A $390,000 grant for a solar array at the grocery store in Carlinville; $27,000 for solar panels at an auto body shop in Staunton; $51,000 for a solar array for a golf course in Alton.

Since 2023, farmers and businesses in Illinois have been approved for more than 590 REAP grants, making the state the third highest in number of recipients in the United States, Floodlight’s analysis shows. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Bruns said the decision to freeze such grants has caused unneeded stress for farmers. Before the executive order, USDA’s rural development team had worked hard to bring dollars for renewable energy projects to Illinois farmers, she said.

“That’s the thing we should be celebrating right now,” Bruns said, “and instead we have to fight to make sure that money actually does land into the pockets of the people who have gone ahead, jumped through all these hoops and are attempting to do the right thing for their businesses and their farms.”

In January, Dan Batson’s nursery in Mississippi was approved for a $400,367 REAP grant—money that he planned to use to install four solar arrays. He intended to use that solar energy to power the pumps that irrigate more than 1 million trees, a move that would have saved the company about $25,000 a year in electricity costs.

Seated in a wooded area about 30 miles north of Biloxi, his 42-year-old GreenForest nursery ships potted magnolias, hollies, crepe myrtles and other trees to southern states. Until a couple of months ago, Batson had been excited about what the grant money would mean for the business.

But when he saw news about the funding being held up earlier this year, he called a local USDA representative who confirmed the funds had been frozen. Batson had already sent the solar contractor $240,000. Now, his plans are on hold.

“I just can’t do the project if I don’t get the money,” he said.

Tuesday’s announcement from the USDA makes him no more confident he’ll get the money, he said.

Batson said he’s a fiscal conservative, so he understands the effort to cut costs. “But,” he said, “the way they’ve gone about it has disrupted a lot of business owners’ lives.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

The post Farmers in Trump Country Were Counting on Clean Energy Grants. Then the Government Changed the Rules. appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Jason Myers-Benner wants answers. Most of the time, the Virginia farmer feels “unsettled” by the lack of communication and clarity surrounding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s funding freeze. During the quieter moments he’s spent staring at an empty inbox, awaiting word about his pending grant, he’s felt “disgusted” by how the government has treated him and many of his peers.

“It’s a sort of powerlessness, that it doesn’t feel like there’s anything that I can do about it,” said Myers-Benner. “Like, can you count on these systems or not?” 

Myers-Benner owns a family-run six acre farm in Keezletown, Virginia. Last spring, the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded him a little more than $18,000 to support the farm’s work breeding winter peas that could increase soil’s ability to trap carbon. The grant is through the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program, or SARE, which has supported farmer-led research initiatives nationwide for decades. The money represented an opportunity to expand work he and his family have been bootstrapping for years, growing crops that help feed lower-income, rural communities like his while preserving the planet.

Then, in late January, the Trump administration began freezing funds for programs across a broad swath of the government. Shortly after, his SARE representative at the University of Georgia fell silent. That’s when he started to worry: Without the grant, which reimburses expenses already incurred, he would need to line up part-time work to pay the bills. “There’s just a deflated feeling of ‘Okay. We were just about getting this rolling,’” he said. “And then … one change at the top has the potential to just completely wipe that out. And so we’ll have to pick up and hard-scrabble our way through it.” 

Myers-Benner finally got an answer on Monday, though one riddled in ambiguity. “You may continue your research or you are welcome to put your research on hold given the uncertainty of the situation, and once we learn more we can communicate that to you,” he was told by email, which he shared with Grist. “If this situation delays your research and outreach per your grant timeline we can offer a no-cost extension if you still have monies left in your budget. Feel free to reach out with any questions. If you decide to hold your project let us know so we can note that in your files. That’s about the best information we can provide at this time while we wait to receive further guidance from USDA.”

The USDA administers SARE through four regional offices hosted in universities. Daramonifah Cooper, a spokesperson for Southern SARE at the University of Georgia, which oversees Myers-Benner’s grant, told Grist it is holding all calls for proposals until it hears from its federal funding source. When asked, Cooper could not clarify the funding status for grants already awarded.

Since late January, the USDA has frozen, rescinded, or cancelled funding supporting everything from donations to food banks to climate-smart agricultural practices. The move aligns with the administration’s goal of rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and climate benchmarks. These steps prompted the termination of thousands of federal employees before courts intervened, pressuring the USDA to reinstate many of them, albeit temporarily, and federal judges have repeatedly ordered the administration to release gridlocked funds. Such abrupt and sweeping moves by the agency, and wider administration, have thrown the world of publicly-funded agricultural research into a tailspin. 

A USDA employee, whom Grist granted anonymity to protect them from retaliation, said “basically all” of the agency’s programs that fund agricultural research, including SARE grants, have been put on standstill due to the freeze. This person called the environment within the agency “a shitshow” and said, “It’s all really unknown right now. Even internally.” 

“We know that, yeah, things have been paused. Some political appointee at some level is reviewing our calls for proposals” this person added. “We know that DOGE is in the system, reviewing, doing searches of our databases, but we don’t know like … are they going to massively cut things right now? Things are on hold. But is the shoe gonna drop, and is lots of stuff getting canceled?” 

“Trump doesn’t really care about farmers or delivering services or efficiency or cost-savings. This is all politics. And we’re caught in the middle of it.”

At least 19 university labs have ceased agricultural research work because the Department of Government Efficiency dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development in February, a move one federal judge said may be unconstitutional. These decisions by the administration have impacted research programs nationwide. 

Kansas State University shut down two labs that were developing drought-resilient varieties of wheat and sorghum crops and pest-resistant plants. Johns Hopkins, the largest university recipient of federal research funding, cut roughly 2,200 jobs. USDA staffing cuts forced a federal project in Maryland investigating unprecedented managed honeybee losses to ask others to carry on its work. Seed and crop research being conducted across the nation’s network of gene banks have also been hobbled by layoffs and grant application suspensions, and grape breeding programs and work on crops affected by wildfire smoke in California have reported disruptions. The administration then announced an abrupt withdrawal of millions in federal funds for multiple universities, triggering a new round of layoffs, lab closures, and project suspensions across the country.

The federal government provides roughly 64 percent of the country’s public agricultural research and development funding. “With federal funding, especially research dollars, being on the chopping board for the current administration, the consequences of that, coupled with layoffs … means that at a time when we need innovation the most to deal with climate change, to make our food systems more resilient, that capacity is going to be lost,” said soil scientist Omanjana Goswami of the nonprofit the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

There will likely be economic fallout, too. A study published March 11 finds that the compounding effects of climate change and lagging investment in research and development has U.S. agriculture facing its first productivity slowdown in decades. 

The researchers modelled the eroding effects of climate change on American agriculture and the decades-long stagnation of spending for publicly funded research and development, using the estimates to quantify the research investment necessary to avoid agricultural productivity declining through 2050. To offset an imminent climate-induced productivity slowdown, federal agricultural research spending, which includes expenditures from every USDA agency except the U.S. Forest Service, and state agricultural experiment stations and schools, must replicate the unprecedented boom in public spending that followed both world wars. The government currently allocates approximately $5 billion annually to ag research and development, a figure that grew less than 1 percent annually from 1970 to 2000 before leveling off. Adding at least $2.2 billion per year to that tally would offset the climate-induced slowdown, the paper found.

If the current investment trend doesn’t change, the costly impacts of warming, including higher inputs, reduced yields, and supply chain shocks, will result in lower productivity, leading to more government bailouts and increased U.S. reliance on other countries for food, said Cornell University climate and agricultural economist Ariel Ortiz-Bobea. Without action, agricultural productivity is estimated to drop up to 12 percent with each passing year by 2050. This will cost the U.S. economy billions annually. American farms contributed roughly $222.3 billion to the economy in 2023 alone. 

“This is like a double whammy. They’re both human-caused, inflicted wounds. One because we’re failing to invest in R&D, the other because we’re emitting so much that it is actually slowing down productivity itself. So it’s like it’s being compressed from both sides,” said Ortiz-Bobea, who led the new study. 

Experts worry that the Trump administration is heading in the wrong direction with its layoffs, funding freezes, and efforts to roll back scientific initiatives. House Republicans, for example, have been pushing to cut some $230 billion in agriculture spending over 10 years. Millions of dollars in reductions to the USDA’s research, inspection, and natural resources arms were included in the funding stopgap bill Trump signed March 15. 

Most of the foundational agricultural research that happens in the United States is through some kind of USDA funding mechanism. The USDA is made up of multiple agencies and offices with their own research pipelines that support universities, nonprofits, businesses, farmers, ranchers, and foresters, among others. SARE grants are one of the ways the wider agency has funneled money into agricultural research conducted on farms nationwide, awarding nearly $406 million across 8,791 initiatives from its inception.

Jon Kasza runs an organic vegetable farm in New York’s Hudson Valley and relies on SARE funds to conduct his agricultural research. He doesn’t understand why the agency is still freezing that funding, given all of the administration’s promises to put farmers first. “I can’t say enough about how fragile it all looks to me,” said Kasza. He’s thinking about the excessively volatile bouts of rain that battered his fields in summer of 2023, followed by a smattering of dry periods last year that dried his soil so much he couldn’t plant his cover crops on-time in the fall. That’s where research grants like SARE, which he said allow farmers to bypass the typically “sluggish” timelines of conventional scientific trials to develop things like drought-resistant crop varieties, are critical. 

In November, he submitted his first SARE grant proposal of nearly $30,000 to grow multiple varieties of rice on hillsides in raised beds with biodegradable plastic mulch to conserve water and expand where the crop can be produced. Earlier this year, he was notified by a regional representative that the grant had been approved. “We’re moving forward as if some of the funding is going to be there, but we know that that’s uncertain,” said Kasza, who called the messaging surrounding the freeze a “rollercoaster” of confusion. A local land conservation group has promised to step in to save about 20 percent of the project if federal funding falls through. Still, that is “not nearly enough” to complete the work, he said.

“It’s already hard enough just to have an agricultural business, but then to have climate change as a factor on top of that, and then have this administration who’s wreaking havoc?” he said. “Cutting research, particularly our farmer-driven research, off at the knees, just seems like such a silly and short-sighted thing to do.”

On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, another SARE grant recipient has also been stuck in limbo. Rancher Don Heacock spent decades working as an aquatic biologist for the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources before retiring and launching his nearly 40-acre farm in the late 1980s. Ever since, he’s raised a herd of water buffalo, grown crops like taro, and cultivated ponds of tilapia. He does it all with local food systems, soil health, and water conservation at the forefront, maximizing crop diversity, maintaining living roots in the ground year round, and integrating livestock farming. 

Up until now, Heacock had heard nothing about his pending SARE grant, a $59,000 funding proposal submitted last year to expand his farm’s agrotourism education, buffalo raising, and soil conservation work. Then, suddenly, late last week, he was told the proposal was denied. He believes that rejection is linked to the federal funding freeze.

After reaching out to SARE representatives for all four regions and the national arm of the program, Grist has learned that the USDA-NIFA has frozen funding for all pending grant applications this fiscal year, which began in October. When asked, a national spokesperson confirmed those funds were still “under review” while regional representatives told Grist that all new calls for proposals have been paused as a result. None of the representatives specified a timeline for when those funds were disbursed nor whether already-awarded grant funding will be released. 

For farmers like Heacock, the stakes of the administration grounding agricultural research initiatives like his is far bigger than the work happening on one lone project or farm. “Trump has got it all wrong. Climate is a real issue and it’s hitting us right in the face,” he said. “If we don’t become sustainable real quick, we’re dead in the water.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers are reeling from Trump’s attacks on agricultural research on Mar 25, 2025.