Standing in the Breach
When the federal government began freezing, delaying and terminating billions of dollars in climate and energy funding in 2025, hundreds of organizations—many of them first-time federal grantees serving communities on the front lines of environmental harm—faced a sudden, disorienting crisis.
Grants they had been awarded were suspended without warning. Costs they had already incurred went unreimbursed. The rules kept changing, and guidance from federal agencies disappeared.
The Environmental Protection Network (EPN) and Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG) refused to let those organizations face this alone.
Kathy Pope, EPN’s Development Director, said, “We helped several grantees draw down significant dollars, in one case over $1 million, when a positive preliminary injunction was in place.”
With support from Kresge and in partnership with a broad coalition of national, regional and community-based organizations, EPN and L4GG built something that didn’t exist before: a coordinated national support system integrating legal, technical and communications assistance for more than 800 federal grantees across the country.
The scale of what was at stake is staggering—more than $60 billion in federal climate and energy investments hung in the balance. But the work was deeply personal, too, and included one-on-one calls with overwhelmed grantees, rapid-response guidance when a court ruling created a narrow window to draw down funds, and translation of more than 200 executive orders into plain language that organizations could act on.
“We helped several grantees draw down significant dollars, in one case over $1 million, when a positive preliminary injunction was in place.”
Kathy Pope, Development Director, EPN
L4GG helped coordinate major litigation challenging grant terminations representing more than $30 billion in climate and environmental justice funding. And when legal pathways narrowed after a 2025 Supreme Court decision required organizations to pursue relief in the Court of Federal Claims (COFC), they launched a COFC Clinic, now supporting more than 40 grantees. Throughout this period, EPN played a critical role in ensuring grantees were informed of the rapidly evolving landscape, remained in compliance while contesting terminations, and were supported in deciding if and how to engage in litigation. And when federal dollars were no longer viable, they connected organizations to alternative funding and financing to keep critical work alive.
The results speak to something larger than any single grant recovered or lawsuit filed. The $4.5 billion Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program is still operating, a fact the partners attribute in part to the sustained legal and public pushback that made further terminations politically and legally costly for the administration.
A full-court legal press also forced Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice to prioritize among the many challenges. That is one reason why, after a federal judge ordered $180 million in funding through the Environmental Justice Grantmaker Program to be unfrozen, the Trump Administration appealed the ruling but did not try to immediately reinstate a funding freeze. As a result, EPN has been helping those grantees continue to deploy funding to local communities across a territory covering 15 States and 315 Federally Recognized Tribes.
Without this infrastructure, many organizations would have faced compliance errors, missed deadlines and permanent funding losses of their own. Some would have been forced to shut down programming entirely. Communities already bearing the greatest burden of environmental harm were at risk of losing resources designed specifically to reach them.
Instead, EPN and L4GG held the line, not just on funding, but on the promise that historic climate investments would actually serve the people and places they were meant to reach.
