Rural leaders push Congress to unfreeze climate and environmental funds

The marble office building near Capitol Hill is a world away from Tom Atkinson’s home above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. The boss of an electric company in Kotzebue, Atkinson would rather be there, on the freezing edge of the Chukchi Sea. But he’s in Washington, D.C., waiting for a meeting with Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican, to plead for help.

Kotzebue is one of scores of communities caught up in a funding freeze as the Trump administration looks to boost the fossil fuel industry while rolling back climate and environmental initiatives that started under former President Biden. The Energy Department had promised to pay for batteries that can store electricity from wind and solar plants in northwest Alaska, Atkinson says, reducing how much diesel fuel has to be shipped in to run generators. But once President Trump took office, he says the funding Congress approved was cut off.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Atkinson, who runs the Kotzebue Electric Association, says before he’s ushered into Murkowski’s office. “As far as we’re concerned, energy shouldn’t really have a political stripe attached to it. It’s just for the benefit of all of our members and our cooperative,” he adds.

“They just want the lights to go on. They want the rates to be affordable. And we can’t continue to do that without continued support.”

Atkinson was part of a group of about 50 leaders from rural communities in eight states — mainly in the western U.S. and Alaska — who travelled to Washington last week to urge lawmakers to preserve funding for climate and environmental projects that is threatened by the Trump administration.

Organized by a nonpartisan group called United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, the trip was part of a larger effort by cities, states and civil society groups to stop the administration from withholding investments Congress authorized under the country’s first major climate policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. There’s also a push to dissuade Republican lawmakers from getting rid of tax credits that support clean energy projects.

“This unsteadiness, uncertainty is impacting the ability to move important projects, everything from agriculture projects, clean-energy projects, building roads, building bridges,” says Paul Getsos, project director at United Today, Stronger Tomorrow. Those disruptions are having an outsized impact in rural communities, Getsos says, which have struggled for years to attract investment and retain jobs.

The U.S. Department of Energy didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

A spokesperson for the Environmental Protection Agency, Molly Vaseliou, said in an email statement to NPR that the agency is “reviewing its grant funding to ensure it is appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.”

A spokesperson for Murkowski, Joe Plesha, told NPR that the senator is working with the Trump administration to unfreeze grant funding.

Atkinson says the reception he got from lawmakers in Washington was “relatively good.” But “I don’t know that they have given us a lot of promises that they can act on,” he adds.

Rural leaders say climate, environmental funding shouldn’t be political

Lenise Peterman huddled in a crowded hallway with a staffer for Utah Sen. John Curtis, a Republican. Peterman, the Republican mayor of Helper, Utah, a couple hours south of Salt Lake City, came to Washington to try to pry loose money from the EPA that’s supposed to support job training and to weatherize homes on the Navajo Nation.

“It’s not Republican, it’s not Democrat — it’s about helping those people who are most disadvantaged in our communities,” Peterman says.

Without government funding, “projects can’t happen,” Peterman adds. “We can’t stand up job-training programs, and those are so meaningful, especially in rural areas.”

Curtis Yanito, who’s part of the southeastern Utah Navajo and a delegate on the Navajo Nation Council, puts his arm around Peterman as he describes the benefits that federal investments could deliver in his community, which suffers from high unemployment and poor infrastructure.

“If you come and visit our nation, we’re like a third world country there,” Yanito says. On the Navajo Nation’s reservation, which is spread across parts of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, the unemployment rate is 48.5%, and a lot of homes lack electricity and running water.

A spokesperson for Curtis, Adam Cloch, pointed to a previous statement in which the senator expressed support for clean-energy tax credits.

Those tax credits, and grant funding that’s been frozen by the Trump administration, are crucial for boosting local economies throughout rural America, says Marcie Kindred, executive director of the Wyoming AFL-CIO, a federation of trade unions.

“When rural communities receive their tax dollars back, we build our communities with our own hands,” Kindred says. “We need our congressional delegations to advocate for these tax dollars to come back home.”

But after meetings with Republican lawmakers in Washington, Kindred says she mostly just heard political talking points.

Wyoming’s congressional delegation didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Peterman, the Republican mayor of Helper, Utah, says the federal funding is especially important in rural areas.

“We don’t have the tax base that a more urban environment has,” she says. “So, when we get those infusions of cash to bring projects to fruition, to me, it has triple, quadruple the impact that it might have in a more urban setting.”