Weeks of actions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency meant to tear up regulations, eviscerate its climate research and eliminate any focus on environmental justice have left Bay Area nonprofits reeling and confused.

Federal funding was cut, or at least frozen, for work including planting hundreds of trees, developing local air quality monitoring and bolstering a youth climate collective, but nonprofit leaders in East Palo Alto, West Oakland and South San Francisco have already hired staff to fulfill grants, paid graduate student stipends for research and spent years developing a sweeping range of projects.

“We might have to lay them off,” said Brian Beveridge, co-executive director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, which hired at least one staff member to help fulfill a grant analyzing local air quality. “There are real impacts for real humans. It’s not just about a bunch of money being thrown around.”

The local nonprofits are scrambling to operate without federal funding and to fulfill their missions — centered on climate science and the health of communities of color — as the Trump administration is pulling grants from organizations grounded in environmental justice.

“This is just a wholesale onslaught on anything that has to do with our environment,” U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff said in an interview with KQED. The administration wants “to weaken our clean water, clean air rules.”

This week, EPA officials terminated $20 billion in grants issued by the Biden administration, many of which were meant to finance clean energy and climate projects through a green bank. Environmental groups filed a lawsuit in response.

Administration officials have also targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs, saying that what they call wasteful spending needs to be cut to align with President Trump’s orders. Over the past few months, the EPA cut or froze hundreds of grants, including some in the Bay Area.

The agency also announced it will disassemble all of its environmental justice offices across the country. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the cuts will eliminate “forced discrimination programs” and “serve every American with equal dignity and respect.”

“‘Environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activists instead of actually spending those dollars to directly remediate environmental issues for those communities,” Zeldin said in a statement on Wednesday announcing the termination of the offices.

The EPA has not responded to KQED’s request for comment.

For decades, EPA environmental justice workers have fought pollution in lower-income communities of color, who experience that burden most acutely.

These neighborhoods sprung up along smoggy highways, next to power plants, busy ports and other polluting industries that belch toxic gas. Their growth largely followed discriminatory redlining by financial institutions that denied people housing opportunities based on race, perpetuating wealth gaps and segregation.

David González, an assistant professor of public health at UC Berkeley, said he wishes Zeldin understood the “long-term persistent life expectancy gaps when we look at different racial and ethnic groups.”

“If we don’t talk about racism, then we can’t address what we see when we look at the data,” he said. “Black people are more likely to have poor health and more likely to have shorter lives. Why does that happen? We need to be able to talk about it so that we can fix it.”

Maya Carrasquillo, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Berkeley, said the federal government is sending “a clear message — all puns intended — about whose lives matter and whose lives don’t.”

“It’s a huge blow,” she said, adding that this is a moment for California to double down on its support of environmental justice. “So many people are rallying around these organizations, and I hope we’ll continue to rally around them. In the past, we have found creative ways to get the work done. And unfortunately, we’re at the point of having to do that again.”

Carrasquillo is part of a team that was awarded an EPA grant that could eventually install tree planters in East Oakland. The federal government froze that money in late January but later restored it.

After Beveridge’s West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project was awarded a $500,000 EPA grant last year to study air quality, he said the federal payment system for grants was frozen and then unfrozen around 36 hours later in January. However, EPA staff aren’t communicating with the group, so they don’t know the status of the invoices, he said.

The EPA also froze and then unfroze a separate $91,000 contract with his organization to improve local air quality monitoring. Still, Beveridge expects the federal government to issue a stop-work order for that project soon.

“Students have been working at it for about three months,” he said. “We have paid the students stipends to do research. We have paid our staff to work on the project. So we have commitments there that are outstanding expenses.”

Climate Resilient Communities, based in East Palo Alto, has three EPA grants totaling around $850,000 that are now up in the air — all from the closing environmental justice office. The largest grant of $500,000 would provide air purifiers for children with asthma, said Cade Cannedy, the group’s director of programs.

The group planned to strengthen a youth climate collective, develop a vulnerability assessment for the Belle Haven and North Fair Oaks communities and research the impact of climate change on air quality along the San Francisco Bay.

“We stopped billing for them because if it’s not paid for, that is something that would sink our organization,” said Cannedy.

The group holds a fourth EPA grant of $450,000 to study East San José’s watershed that has not formally been revoked, but Cannedy said it might be soon and “it’s very risky to continue working on it because we aren’t sure if we will get paid.”

“I hired people six months ago and trained them to lead these projects. Then, when we were about to start, everything went dark,” said Violet Wulf-Saena, the group’s executive director.

Wulf-Saena said she has no plans to fire new staff and is allocating their time to other projects, but there has been zero communication about whether the federal government will restore the grants.

“It means we’re borrowing from the future,” she said. “If we use these projects to speed up the work and pay for these people’s time, then next year, we won’t have any funding for those projects. We’re going to run out of money.”

Julio Garcia, executive director of Rise South City, said a similar story unfolded in South San Francisco over the past few months. In January, the U.S. Forest Service froze a $600,000 grant for planting and maintaining 700 trees across the city to improve air quality.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service declined an interview request and said in an email that the agency doesn’t have specific information on individual contracts. The spokesperson also said that on Feb. 24, the service “was able to begin making payments for work that had already been completed on existing contracts and agreements. With that said, we are still reviewing all programs to ensure alignment with the President’s priorities.”

The freeze surprised Garcia initially, but when the Trump administration flagged hundreds of words for his administration to limit or avoid, like climate science, environmental justice and Latinx, he knew the decision would thwart his work. The group’s mission statement includes at least two banned words: equity and intersectional.

He said the changes on the federal level will likely impact how the organization pitches to private funders because “donors are scared about where they’re donating” and will think twice about funding climate change initiatives or organizations fighting for environmental justice.

Undocumented immigrants and people of color may “go back to not having an opinion” in decision-making, he said, because they won’t attend public meetings out of fear of retaliation.

“We had a couple of presentations at the end of February, and fewer people showed up,” he said. “Those are the communities more affected by climate change.”