Many Groups Promised Federal Aid Still Have No Funds and No Answers

Last year, the Ritenour School District in Missouri won a $9.5 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, to replace its worn-out diesel school buses with clean-running electric models.

By mid-January, the buses were almost there: waiting at a dealer’s lot, just an hour away. All the district had to do was withdraw its grant money and make the last payment.

Then President Trump took office, and the E.P.A. refused to let the district take the money. The agency is still refusing, despite two court orders telling the Trump administration to end a freeze on federal grants.

The buses have not moved an inch.

“The buses are 52 miles away from us in small-town Illinois, and we can’t get them here,” said Chris Kilbride, the superintendent of the Ritenour district, which educates 6,500 students in the St. Louis suburbs.

The Trump administration is still freezing an unknown number of federal grants, according to nonprofits, government agencies and other recipients who say they cannot get access to money promised to them by past administrations.

After losses in court, however, Trump officials have shifted the rationale they’ve offered for freezing the funds — saying this is no longer a broad hold, but a targeted pause on specific grants it objects to, because they did not meet previously required conditions.

On Wednesday, that approach seemed to be working. A federal judge who had blocked the broad freeze allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to claw back money from New York City after the agency alleged mismanagement of a housing grant.

Still, recipients of a vast array of federal grants, large and small, said they remained in the dark.

They have been left to stop their projects — wildfire prevention in Montana, solar panels in Massachusetts, an emergency shelter in Mississippi — and stiff their vendors, waiting for explanations that do not come. Is this just a misunderstanding? A glitchy computer system, overloaded by panicky groups trying to get their money? Or is their grant gone forever?

“It was just silence. Radio silence,” said Holly Brewer, a professor of American history at the University of Maryland. She had been awarded a competitive grant by the National Archives to study the legal structures that governed slavery in the British Empire and early American society.

“What we’re talking about in the early modern period about authoritarian rule, is actually what we’re seeing” in the handling of these grants, Dr. Brewer said. “Like ignoring the legislature, and treating the executive as if he’s above the law.”

The National Archives did not respond to questions about her grant. The White House did not respond to questions about its broader strategy for keeping grants frozen.

The Trump administration’s initial freeze, covering as much as $3 trillion in grants, was announced on Jan. 27. The idea was to allow new officials time to find “awards already awarded that are in conflict with administration priorities.” Among their targets: grants to help diversity, climate programs and environmental-justice efforts.

Two sets of plaintiffs — a group of nonprofits and an alliance of state attorneys general — filed suit. They said that Congress had appropriated this money, and that the president had no power to freeze it all at once.

That worked. Two judges issued temporary orders blocking the freeze. But the Trump administration saw an opening. It said it was allowed to target or cancel grants one at a time, if it believed those programs violated laws or existing regulations.

“You have to know whether it’s across the board or individual. If it’s across the board, it’s illegal,” said David Super, a professor who studies administrative law at Georgetown University. “If there are facts about a particular grantee that are independent of any of these freezes, then that could be lawful.”

Mr. Super said that the administration would still need to provide a grantee with a justification for freezing or canceling a grant: “It needs to be some actual reason. Not ‘we’re looking for a reason,’” he said.

This week, federal agencies said they were adopting this strategy. The E.P.A., for instance, said it was blocking only some grants, for reasons that it declined to specify.

“E.P.A. personnel have identified certain grants programs as having potential inconsistencies with necessary financial and oversight procedural requirements or grant conditions of awards or programs,” the agency said in a statement. It declined to comment on the specific E.P.A. grants in The New York Times’s reporting.

Even still, changing directives have led to confusion.

A senior official at F.E.M.A., for example, sent an internal email on Monday — reviewed by The Times — calling for a “hold” on a variety of payments. On Tuesday, the official clarified that she meant that payments would now be manually processed to make sure that they were proper.

On Wednesday, one of the judges who had blocked the broader freeze — Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island — said he would not stop FEMA from freezing a grant that awarded millions to New York City to house immigrants. The city said that FEMA had sent $80 million last week, and then taken the money back on Tuesday.

Judge McConnell said that agencies could use “their own lawful authorities to withhold funding.”

These court battles have focused on domestic grants and have not affected the pause in U.S. foreign aid, which remains in effect.

The result has been major disruption, even for groups whose grants have been unfrozen.

Most federal grants do not work like a game-show prize, paid out as one lump sum. Instead, they are more like an endless series of expense reports. The grantee spends its own money on expenses, or tees up a big purchase like the school buses. Only then — with a bill in hand — can it seek reimbursement from a federal account.

“They want to see that you’re not overusing or underusing,” said Erin Trapp, chief executive of the La Pine Community Health Center, a group of federally funded clinics in central Oregon. “We work on that very thin margin,” she said.

Her group’s financial cushion was so thin that, when its funding disappeared for a week in the initial freeze, it laid off more than 10 percent of its staff.

Even still, groups that have received their funding worry that they remain on a target list and the renewed flow of dollars is only temporary.

In some cases, there was so much pent-up demand that as soon as the federal payment systems reopened, they were overwhelmed by groups worried they would be shut off again soon.

“It’s like a bank run,” said Marty Carty, the government affairs director of the Oregon Primary Care Association, who represents clinics like Ms. Trapp’s.

Those groups were the lucky ones. For some, the freeze has still not ended.

In Jackson, Miss., the only explanation Dominika Parry got was one word: her federal grant account said it was “suspended.”

Her nonprofit, 2CMississippi, had received a $20 million grant from the E.P.A.

The money is supposed to be used to renovate a shelter that will protect residents in a poor community from both hurricanes and a more regular threat: power outages, which are common during Jackson’s sweltering summers. It is planned to house 100 people, with air-conditioning connected by a solar-powered micro-grid that runs independently of the city’s power system.

“This is an emergency shelter, but in Jackson, where the power goes out every week, they would be sending someone every week,” Ms. Parry said.

Work was supposed to start March 1, but will not now.

Many of the groups whose funds are still frozen relied on grants from the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions to promote clean energy and fight climate change, or President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s infrastructure bill, which financed transportation, energy, water, broadband internet and other projects. Republicans in Congress opposed the first measure, but dozens of them supported the infrastructure legislation.

In Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said the Trump administration had withheld $117 million in federal funds, imperiling nearly 70 infrastructure projects and more than 120 construction jobs. The state was also unable to get access to more than $529 million from the E.P.A. for projects that included port improvements.

On Tuesday, Montana’s natural resources and conservation department said it was pausing all projects funded by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management because of delays in federal reimbursements. Spokespeople for the Interior Department, which runs the land management bureau, and the Agriculture Department, which runs the forestry service, said that their agencies’ funding decisions were under review to make sure they were consistent with the president’s orders.

In Ovando, Mont., about 40 percent of the financing for a nonprofit called Blackfoot Challenge is now on hold, according to Jennifer Schoonen, a spokeswoman and fund-raiser for the organization. The group, which works to lower the risks of wildfires and mitigate the effects of drought, depends heavily on millions of dollars in multiyear grants from the Agriculture and Interior Departments.

“We are a conservation group that works in a red state and has a long legacy of bringing people of diverse political stripes together,” Ms. Schoonen said.

In Missouri, the Ritenour School District’s buses were also supposed to be paid for under a grant program funded by the infrastructure bill. The district says it also purchased electric vehicle chargers but it cannot access the grant funds needed to pay the contractor who installed those, either.

Mr. Kilbride, the district superintendent, said the electric buses were expected to lower the district’s fuel costs and eliminate the diesel fumes that students had to walk through to reach buses after school.

The district had ordered 24, but only three had arrived before the money was frozen.

If the E.P.A. will not release the money for the rest of the electric buses, the school district itself will have to pay for new, cheaper diesel buses. If that happened, Mr. Kilbride said, the result would be six fewer teachers hired for next year. He has talked to a congressional representative and reached out to Missouri senators about the issue.

“Let us complete this project,” he said. “Just follow through on the commitments that were made in good faith.”

Noah Weiland, Mattathias Schwartz and Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.