A Baltimore nonprofit that helps residents who have children with asthma and removes lead in homes will receive $60 million in funding that the Trump administration had cut via the Environmental Protection Agency.
Baltimore-based Green and Healthy Homes sued the administration in April after Trump’s EPA looked to nix “environmental justice” departments within the agency.
Most, if not all, of those departments focus on low-income and marginalized communities that are home to people of color.
Those cuts were made using tools as arbitrary as keyword searches for environmental justice terms to find organization, attorneys for the three nonprofits affected argued in court, and had no legal reason for elimination.
U.S. District Court Judge Adam B. Abelson agreed that the $180 million in funding that had been ended by the EPA for Green and Healthy Homes, Philanthropy Northwest and the Minneapolis Foundation should be restored.
Abelson also said that that the funding cuts had been made in contradiction to a direct mandate in the Inflation Reduction Act that set aside money specifically for “environmental and climate justice.”
“In other words,” Abelson wrote in his 48-page opinion, “EPA contends that it has authority to thumb its nose at Congress and refuse to comply with its directives.”
