Residents of a Cook Inlet village were devastated in May after getting news that the Trump administration had canceled a $20 million grant to upgrade homes and build new ones, residents said.
Tyonek leaders had planned to use the federal grant to remove asbestos, lead and mold from aging homes, and to weatherize the houses to cut rising energy costs.
The grant would also have paid for construction of 20 new houses to bring some tribal members back to the village. About 160 people live in Tyonek, located across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, but it has close to 1,000 tribal members.
But those plans are off after the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency, said Vide Kroto, executive director of the village’s Tebughna Foundation that applied for the grant.
“It just feels so wrong and so unfair to have everyone’s hopes up,” Kroto said. “Now, there is just so much lost.”
The award is part of $280 million in funding that the U.S Environmental Protection Agency has canceled in recent months in Alaska. That’s part of the billions the agency has terminated nationwide.
The cancellations stem from executive orders from President Donald Trump that target renewable energy and climate change initiatives funded by the Inflation Reduction Act that passed without Republican support under President Joe Biden.
The grants would have benefited dozens of Alaska communities with projects such as water and sewer installations to replace honey buckets, building erosion barriers to combat flooding from thawing permafrost, and erecting solar arrays and wind turbines as an alternative to the costly diesel fuel that typically powers rural Alaska.
The canceled grants include two in Southeast Alaska.
Working with the Organized Village of Kake, the regional nonprofit Spruce Root lost a $2.9 million grant. The money would have provided education programs in Kake, focusing on permitting, climate adaptation planning and natural resource management decisions. The plan was to share the work with tribal communities in Angoon, Hoonah and Yakutat, according to an EPA spreadsheet of canceled grants.
The EPA also canceled a $19.5 million grant to the Metlakatla Indian Committee, working with the national nonprofit Nature Conservancy, to promote seaweed farming, electrically powered boats for the seaweed operations, and reductions in toxic air emissions by investing in municipal waste management to end open-air trash burning.
Alaska’s U.S. senators say they’re working to bring more funding to Alaska, and have fought for the creation of a new stream of money from EPA that will pass through the Denali Commission, a federal agency that funds infrastructure projects in rural Alaska.
But leaders in villages that have lost the Biden-era grants say the new stream of money is much smaller and may not fully restore the canceled grants, if at all.
Kroto said the Tyonek grant would have created new jobs in the village, trained young people for solar panel maintenance and helped reunite families.
She said the village foundation had spent many months and hundreds of thousands of dollars from the grant before it was canceled, working with contractors and other partners on the design and plans for the work.
The canceled grants in Alaska largely fall into two buckets.
More than $150 million would have helped nine villages under the $1.6 billion Community Change program, according to grant recipients who confirmed the terminations. The program targeted environmental and climate justice projects in disadvantaged communities.
Another $125 million would have added solar power to Alaska rooftops in cities and dozens of rural communities, under the $7 billion Solar for All national program, according to those grant recipients.
The terminated funding is a big setback for the Native Village of Kipnuk in Southwest Alaska, said Rayna Paul, the tribe’s environmental director.
The village of about 800 had planned to use its $20 million Community Change grant to combat erosion on the Kugkaktlik River related to thawing permafrost.
More land is being lost each year and homes are increasingly at risk, while a single storm swallowed an entire acre of land last year. Paul said the grant would have helped shore up the riverbank to protect wind turbines, fuel tanks and other community infrastructure.
“Losing the grant was a huge loss,” Paul said. “Community members were very devastated when I told them. They were like, ‘Oh no, what are we gonna do now? We are losing so much land.’”
The village has joined other communities in a lawsuit against the EPA. The plaintiffs argue that Congress has not de-obligated the Community Change grants as required by law.
The federal agency argues that it is following executive orders issued by Trump and is ensuring that spending aligns with presidential policies.
Richard Leon, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the federal government last month, saying he lacks jurisdiction over what amounts to a contract dispute that belongs in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Kipnuk and other plaintiffs have appealed the decision.
Alaska’s Republican senators point to their efforts to establish a different stream of money for Alaska from the EPA.
The agency recently awarded $100 million to the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency that funds rural Alaska infrastructure like roads, fuel farms, water and sewer systems, clinics and other infrastructure.
The commission said the money will upgrade aging fuel tank farms in 10 Western Alaska villages.
The money, however, won’t go to those communities that lost the EPA grants.
But an additional $40 million funding stream from the agency is in the pipeline and could be used to help some of them, said Jocelyn Fenton, director of programs at the Denali Commission.
“We will be evaluating elements of the projects that were rescinded, and we will be going through a vetting process to make this $40 million stretch as far as we can,” she said. “We have to weigh the administration’s goals and guidance and look at the projects that will pass muster.”
The projects could require a relatively small matching grant from the communities, Fenton said.
Kroto, with the Tyonek foundation, said she’s hopeful the village can still secure some money from the $40 million. But the match requirement could be a barrier for the foundation.
“The (canceled) grant did not require a match, so that’s why it was so great for villages and foundations,” she said.
Sheryl Musgrove, with the Alaska Institute for Justice that worked with the Kipnuk tribe to land its grant, agreed the match requirement will be a barrier.
“Where will tribes get that?” Musgrove said. “They don’t have that kind of money.”

The Wrangell Sentinel contributed reporting for this story.