Some Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant recipients are still unable to access funding, despite two temporary restraining orders halting the Trump administration’s funding freeze. The freeze was ordered on January 20, 2025, when President Trump signed an executive order pausing climate funding connected to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and expanded upon in a later Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo that paused all grants and loans from all federal agencies.
On January 28, a federal judge issued a restraining order on the OMB policy, which was rescinded the following day by the Trump administration. On February 3, the same judge issued another order that directed OMB to release all frozen funds. Despite these orders, the reversal has not been universally implemented. Some of the individuals and groups that received EPA grant money still have not regained access to the funds, while others have regained access only to lose it again. “We’ve gotten mixed messaging, and obviously it concerns our employees as well as the communities that we serve,” said Alex Bomstein, executive director of the Clean Air Council, which currently has three EPA grants.