Five months after the Trump administration canceled a series of environmental grants for Alaska, including an erosion-control grant that was to have gone to one of the villages hardest hit by ex-Typhoon Halong, the fight over the money continues.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski in her speech Oct. 18 to the annual Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage, said she is trying to restore some of the canceled funding, including money that was to have gone to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta village of Kipnuk.
The village of 700 had been awarded $20 million by the Biden administration to combat problems connected with permafrost thaw and other climate change effects, but in May the Trump administration canceled that and other grants.
The Alaska senator blasted officials who characterized the grant to Kipnuk as wasteful.
“I am offended,” she said. “I am outright mad that some have suggested that it is a waste of taxpayer dollars to protect Alaskan communities. We are Americans. Every single person that has been impacted is an American that deserves to be treated with that level of respect.”
Murkowski was responding to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and his spokesperson, who issued what delegates to the AFN convention considered to be insulting statements.
In a post on the social media site X, Zeldin called news reports about the canceled grant “left-wing hackery” that were dishonest. The grants would not have provided protection in time for ex-Typhoon Halong, he said.
“And to be brutally candid, due to the proactive cancellation of this grant, $20 million of hardworking U.S. tax dollars are currently sitting in the U.S. treasury instead of swept into the Kuskokwim River,” his post said. He concluded the post on a pugnacious note: “As for the clowns who want the EPA to light tens of billions of tax dollars on fire, we refuse to bend the knee and play along.”
The Kipnuk grant was to have paid for a barrier on the rapidly eroding Kugkaktlik River. The project was part of Kipnuk’s broader erosion control and climate-change adaptation plan, which includes elements of “managed retreat,” the relocation of some structures and facilities to safer ground farther from the river.
Murkowski, in her AFN speech, said it may be true that work under the canceled grant would not have come in time for the devastation wrought by ex-Typhoon Halong. But that and other grants were still needed, she said.
“They may prevent future disasters, and that’s the point,” she said. “It’s not just what happens today. It’s the ability to look forward out into the future, to make it better into the future.”
The Kipnuk grant had been among several awarded by the Biden administration to Alaska Native communities under the EPAs’ Community Change Grant Program. That program was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a piece of legislation that passed with no Republican votes. In all, over $150 million in Alaska grants under the program were canceled by the Trump administration.
Among the nixed grants was $20 million previously awarded to Kotzebue for expansion of wind power. As in other areas of rural Alaska, residents of Kotzebue are seeking to reduce reliance on diesel fuel, which is costly and difficult to transport and store, by shifting to locally produced renewable energy.
The administration also canceled a previously awarded $20 million grant to Utqiagvik, the nation’s northernmost community, for work to protect infrastructure from permafrost thaw, improvements to the utility system and other environmental tasks.
Aside from the more than $150 million in Community Change Grant Program funding for Alaska that the Trump administration’s EPA canceled, the agency also eliminated the Biden-era Solar For All program and, with it, $125 million in funding that had been awarded to expand solar energy in Alaska.
At a news conference following her AFN speech, Murkowski said the state’s congressional delegation and others might be able to use a $40 million pot of money to restore some of the lost project funding. That would be much less than a full restoration, she conceded.
“The Community Change Grant Program was very specific, and the criteria were very specific. And so many of our communities, including Kipnuk, met the criteria,” she told reporters. “That’s where the real tragedy is in all of this. But we’re working to get some portion of that funding to go towards Kipnuk again, to recognize that you’ve got a vulnerability in the community and how they’re able to address it. You can’t do it with just a lot of good thoughts.”
The administration also eliminated a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. That program funded projects intended to prevent damages from disasters like floods, thus saving money that would be spent on recovery and repair.
Murkowski said the administration has taken the position that it will oppose anything having to do with resilience or “anything that has the word ‘climate’ in it,” she said.
“Crazy, in my view,” she said.
In her convention speech, Murkowski described what she saw the previous day in Kipnuk — an eerily quiet village that a week earlier would have been filled with children playing and four-wheelers zipping around. She also saw one of the main obstacles to escaping this and other storms.
“Flying over, you realize there is no retreat to higher ground, because there is no higher ground in many parts of the delta,” she said.
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