Trump EPA Cuts Strip $3M Grant From Florida Climate Nonprofit
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- Trump administration has drastically cut environmental and disadvantaged-community programs since returning to the White House, eliminating protections for groups with the fewest resources to cope with climate impacts, according to CLEO Institute CEO Yoca Arditi-Rocha.
- CLEO Institute lost an EPA Community Change Grant of approximately $3 million, awarded with Palm Beach County to deliver climate literacy and resilience training in South Florida, after the Trump administration pulled the funding.
- Arditi-Rocha said CLEO has not been able to replace the lost $3 million and described the nonprofit landscape as a "scarcity moment and a hostile moment."
- Florida's Latino, Black, and brown communities are bearing the brunt of rising energy costs, extreme weather, insurance prices, and food prices without federal safety nets, Arditi-Rocha said, calling the situation "a perfect storm brewing."
- Arditi-Rocha argued the entire federal environmental justice program has been "eradicated" and pushed back on the administration's early "energy crisis" framing, saying: "We didn't have an energy crisis then. We have one now."
- CLEO Institute runs multilingual climate literacy training in schools, community settings, and online — including Spanish and English sessions in South Florida — to teach residents how pollution drives warming and how to prepare for extreme weather.
Why it matters: The $3 million loss translates directly into cancelled climate literacy and resilience training for South Florida's most exposed Latino, Black, and brown communities through a partnership with Palm Beach County. By reframing energy costs, utility bills, and climate impacts as cost-of-living issues "on the ballot," Arditi-Rocha is trying to move environmental justice from a niche concern into a voter-priority frame ahead of the midterms.
