Rayna Paul warned a federal court earlier this year that EPA’s decision to nix a $20 million climate grant could leave her tiny Alaskan village vulnerable to “catastrophe.”
Much of that village was swept away Oct. 12.
Typhoon Halong was strengthened by abnormally warm sea-surface temperatures when it hit western Alaska. Its remnants lifted homes in Kipnuk, Alaska, off of their foundations and carried them away, according to the website for Paul’s GoFundMe campaign.
“The wooden boardwalks that connect our community are shattered,” wrote Paul, who serves as environmental director for the high-poverty Alaska Native village. “Power lines are down. The land itself has changed; it’s heartbreaking to see.”
Paul, who could not be reached for this story, is now planning to relocate with her family.
Kipnuk was awarded a $20 million grant last year to defend itself against climate change-driven erosion and flooding. It was one of nine Alaskan communities and 105 communities nationwide to receive grants under EPA’s Community Change Grant program — a $1.6 billion climate law initiative that aimed to help low-income and disadvantaged communities address long-standing environmental and climate risks.
The Trump administration canceled the grants in May, months after EPA had issued award agreements. Grantees are now fighting an increasingly uphill battle in federal court to challenge those terminations.
It’s hard to say whether the grant would have saved Kipnuk. The award was for three years beginning in March 2025, and the work may have continued for that entire time. Typhoon Halong was also a uniquely powerful storm, with wind speeds of 113 miles per hour measured in Alaska.
Asked about the connection between the disaster in Kipnuk and EPA’s grant termination — which was first revealed in a New York Times article last week — EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said the flooding showed that EPA funds would have been wasted.
“To be brutally candid, due to the proactive cancellation of this grant, $20 million of hardworking U.S. tax dollars are currently sitting in the U.S. treasury instead of swept into the Kuskokwim River,” she said in a response to POLITICO’s E&E News. The village is located at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
“The ‘environmental justice’ funding cancelled by EPA would not have prevented or safeguarded the community from the mass destruction and tragedy caused by such a large and devastating typhoon,” she added, pointing out that the project’s construction timeline had it breaking ground in 2026.
‘Looming devastation’
Kipnuk, a federally recognized Native American tribe, faces multiple risks from climate change.
Warmer temperatures drive more frequent and severe storms and sea-level rise. Climate change is also thawing permafrost and causing the ground under Kipnuk to sink, accelerating erosion and making the village even more vulnerable to flooding.
In July, Paul explained in a statement filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that Kipnuk originally stood hundreds of feet away from the riverbank. But erosion had brought the river to the town, where it now threatened homes, warehouses, fuel tanks and a fragile electrical system.
“As more land falls into the Kugkaktlik River, the strip of land on which our village is located continues to narrow, squeezing our village between the lakes to the south and the river to the north,” Paul wrote. “We will soon have no safe place in our village to move homes, buildings, and other infrastructure at risk from erosion.”
Kipnuk was planning to use the $20 million EPA grant to stabilize the Kugkaktlik riverbank to prevent it from eroding further, and to repair and replace the town’s system of boardwalks. Boardwalks are needed because the land under Kipnuk is too marshy to walk or drive on in the summer.
The money would also have made it possible for the village to relocate hazardous waste that threatens its water supply. Paul’s statement mentions “abandoned fuel tanks, transformers, lead acid batteries, and glycol that can become inundated during a flooding event or dislodged into the river.”
“Without the grant, we may not have the funding to remove and relocate these hazardous materials to a safe location,” she told the court.
EPA sent letters to Kipnuk and other program awardees in May explaining that their grants were canceled because they “will not accomplish the EPA funding priorities for achieving program goals.”
“The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities,” the letters state.
In earlier communications with grantees — soon after the start of President Donald Trump’s second term — EPA cited the president’s executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion as the cause of the funding freeze.
Kipnuk and other environmental justice awardees took EPA to court in June to challenge the decision, arguing that the terminations defied Congress’ Inflation Reduction Act directives to distribute the grants. But a district judge in August dismissed the case on the grounds that it is a federal contracts dispute that should be heard in a federal claims court. The plaintiffs are appealing.
In her court statement, Paul argued that in rescinding Kipnuk’s award, EPA was walking away from the federal government’s historical responsibility to her tribe.
Her ancestors were nomadic for thousands of years, she wrote, and only settled in Kipnuk in the 1920s because the U.S. government chose it as the location of a mandatory Indian school.
“They told us we had to settle there so that our children could attend school. Failure to do so would risk having our children taken away and sent to boarding school, as had happened in the past,” she wrote.
Now Kipnuk “is no longer a safe place to live and work,” Paul wrote in July. Its residents — more than a quarter of whom live below the poverty line — lack the resources to remediate it or to relocate. EPA’s Community Change Grant for Kipnuk was the first federal support the village had ever received “to help our community stabilize the riverbank and prevent the looming devastation that inaction will bring.”
“This is unconscionable and violates my trust in the Federal government,” she said.
Republican support
Ben Grillot, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the Oct. 12 event demonstrated why Kipnuk’s riverbank stabilization project was worthy of EPA’s investment.
“This disaster showed the effect of climate change on these communities,” said Grillot, who is representing environmental justice grantees in their challenge to EPA’s terminations.
Whether the flooding would have coincided with the completion of the project, he said, is “not really the point.”
“The point is that those funds would prevent future problems,” he said.
Jillian Blanchard of Lawyers for Good Government, who is representing the village in its lawsuit against EPA, called EPA’s response to the disaster “supremely callous.”
“Even if the money wouldn’t have fixed the entire problem, it would have helped mitigate the problem and is absolutely critical now to help them rebuild,” she said.
EPA did not respond to questions about whether it might release the funds if Kipnuk needed them to rebuild infrastructure after the flood. The agency did say it was involved in emergency response efforts.
Alaska’s two Republican senators have said they support federal investment in Kipnuk and other remote Native Alaskan villages — including by EPA.
But both Sens. Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski voted for Trump’s megabill this summer, which rescinded any unobligated — or unspent — balances from IRA grant programs, including the Community Change Grants.
Grant recipients have argued in court that their awards weren’t affected by the bill because EPA’s termination of them was unlawful and EPA didn’t follow the necessary process to make them eligible for rescission. But Trump administration attorneys have asked the district court to dismiss the suit on the grounds that the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” clawed back funding for hundreds of awards, including Kipnuk’s.
“This Court is not empowered to make available funding that has been rescinded by Congress,” the Department of Justice wrote in a filing one week after the bill was enacted. “Accordingly, there is no live case or controversy for which this court can grant a remedy.”
Amanda Coyne, a spokesperson for Sullivan, said the senator reached out to EPA in May to ask that funding for Kipnuk be restored.
“He also talked to [EPA Administrator Lee] Zeldin this week about other funding avenues for this and other climate change resiliency grants in rural Alaska,” she said in an email.
She didn’t respond to queries about alternative funding sources.
Murkowski is chair of the Appropriations subcommittee that has jurisdiction over EPA’s budget, as well as the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Her office pointed E&E News to an exchange at a May Appropriations subcommittee hearing on EPA’s budget, in which she questioned Zeldin about the grant terminations.
“The seemingly indiscriminate freezing of EPA funding, regardless of source, has caused some significant anxiety from the folks that I’m talking to in Alaska,” she said.
She noted that $150 million in Community Change Grant awards had been promised to Alaskan recipients — all of them Native communities.
“It’s communities like the little village of Kipnuk, it’s the Native village of Kotzebue,” she said. “[It] took a lot of work to get to the place where they were able to secure the funding, and they’ve had their grants canceled by the agency without any explanation, and so this is where some of the anxiety comes [from].”
Joe Plesha, a spokesperson for Murkowski, also said in an email to E&E News that construction on the project wouldn’t have been completed in time to defend Kipnuk against Typhoon Halong.
“However, these storms emphasize the importance of building resilience moving forward. If that wasn’t clear before, it is now,” he said.
Plesha said that Murkowski had pressed Zeldin and his staff at EPA to reverse course on grants, including Kipnuk’s. He also said that Trump’s tax and spending megalaw — for which Murkowski cast the deciding vote in the Senate — doesn’t allow the agency to rescind funds that were already committed, or obligated.
“Kipnuk’s funds were already obligated, and the reconciliation bill only permits the rescission of ‘unobligated balances,’” said Plesha.
