In the wake of the storm that devastated western Alaska this week, there's been scrutiny of the Trump administration's cancellation of a grant that had been aimed at preventing erosion in one of the hardest hit communities.
Under former President Joe Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the $20 million grant to the village of Kipnuk in December. But after Trump took office, his EPA canceled the grant, along with millions more meant for climate change mitigation and renewable energy projects.
As the Anchorage Daily News reports, the EPA defended that decision this week.
And while there are questions about whether the grant would've done much to help Kipnuk from the storm that hit Sunday, ADN reporter Iris Samuels says it was supposed to be used to build a protective barrier.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Iris Samuels: So the village used to be several hundred feet away from the banks of the river, and over time it's gotten closer and closer and closer. So the goal of this grant was to create an erosion barrier, so that homes and village infrastructure that were at risk from the river eroding would be protected. That was the goal of the grant.
Casey Grove: Gotcha. So my understanding is it was canceled earlier this year. How was it canceled? And I guess, also, why was it canceled? Do we know?
IS: So the grant was awarded in December of 2024, and then Trump was elected, President Trump was elected. And in about March, this grant was frozen, and the EPA administrator basically said that they were reviewing all these grants that had to do with what they refer to as "climate justice," and that potentially some of this funding would be reinstated after it went through this review process. But then in May the grant was formally canceled.
CG: And then, of course, this storm hits Kipnuk, Kwigillingok, other communities have been hit really hard by that, obviously. And folks started looking at this grant and the cancelation of this grant. You reached out to the EPA asking about that. What did they say?
IS: Right. So right from the very beginning, there was this awareness that there was, had been, this grant that was canceled. And we actually heard from Sen. Lisa Murkowski saying, essentially, something along the lines of, and this was back on Monday, really, the day after the storm had hit, that while this grant itself wouldn't have actually saved the damage that was inflicted on Kipnuk by this storm, because the construction wouldn't have been completed in time, what this storm really shows is the importance, broadly speaking, of this grant and grants like it, in protecting these types of communities.
So then I reached out to the EPA, and basically they said, "It's a very good thing that we canceled this grant, because if we hadn't, then construction would have begun, and all the funding that had been awarded would be swept away in the Kuskokwim River," is what they said. So all we have is the written statement that the EPA provided from a spokesperson, so we kind of have to do some parsing of our own, but I think for the people of this community, this statement can come across as in a very, sort of, hurtful way, because reading between the lines, it essentially says, "If there is a risk of this money being wasted, then why spend it at all?"
CG: So now, I mean, from the EPA's perspective, that money has been saved, it's in some account somewhere. Have they said anything about how that might be spent?
IS: So the EPA actually canceled quite a few grants meant for Alaska Native villages and various Alaska communities that were related to the impacts of climate change. And after they canceled hundreds of millions of dollars of grants meant for Alaska, what they did was they actually said, "Now we're going to divert this money to the Denali Commission."
And so, basically, this is $140 million that the EPA has said, "Thanks to the fact that we canceled all these grants, we've now given $140 million to the Denali Commission." But a lot of that money is already accounted for, for projects that don't have to do with, you know, erosion prevention and things like that. So it's really comparing apples to oranges in some cases.
CG: So we're talking about a $20 million grant specific to Kipnuk. But zooming out, the state has known for quite a while about the risks from this kind of a storm and these kind of impacts. Can you kind of walk me through that? It goes back quite a ways, right?
IS: Right, yeah, it goes back really two decades, and it's both the state and federal agencies that have been doing assessments for years, and kind of pointing to the fact that due to erosion, loss of sea ice, loss of permafrost, all of that is contributing or exacerbating the risks, environmental risks, for a lot of Alaska Native villages. And they've been pointing to potential flooding risks in many of these communities, again, for two decades.
Now we see this paper trail of report after report after report saying, "We really need to be doing something about this." And I think that what this storm really shows is, even though people have been saying we really need to be doing something, not enough has been done, and not just for the communities that were affected by this storm, but for quite a few other communities that may be at risk in future storms.
CG: Then, specifically talking about the administration of Gov. Mike Dunleavy, how did they respond to these risks?
IS: So we've seen actually a back and forth in administrations in Alaska for a few years. So actually it was former Gov. Sarah Palin who first created an entity in Alaska that was meant to address the impacts of climate change, and that was this kind of sub-cabinet that she had formed that created these recommendations. Among those recommendations were this idea that we need to prepare for potentially either mitigating erosion or potentially moving certain village sites that were at risk from flooding.
But then her successor (Gov. Sean Parnell) disbanded that sub-cabinet. Then, when former Gov. (Bill) Walker was in office, he created a climate change commission, which again recommended preparing for potential flooding, like what we saw now. And then Gov. Dunleavy disbanded that commission, and he really hasn't taken on sort of a similar flagship effort to try to address climate change.
We do see some of those efforts in some state agencies, so there are people within state government that really are tracking and working really, really hard on this, but without resources and sort of adequate attention, it's really, really difficult to make progress on this.
CG: You had asked Gov. Dunleavy this week about whether or not the impacts from the storm were related to climate change. What did he say about that?
IS: He said that, many times, storms like this are an act of God, or referred to as an act of God. So I don't think he gave a completely definitive answer that it wasn't related to climate change. He just basically said that he wasn't sure, and that he would treat it as an act of God. I think that we've seen the governor sort of take action in addressing storms as they come. We saw that back in 2022 when the remnants of Typhoon Merbok Hit western Alaska, but we haven't really seen any proactive approach or any recognition to the fact that these types of storms may be getting stronger and stronger for a variety of reasons, and that that requires kind of proactive thinking from the state's part.