Donica Brady has worked as a security guard, a school bus driver, and a fabricator of corrugated metal and bridge girders. But her favorite job has been helping to bring solar panels and batteries to tribal communities struggling to pay their utility bills.

“I grew up in a single-parent home,” said Brady, an enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. ​“My mom sometimes had to choose which bills to pay. One of the highest bills here is electricity.”

So when Brady got a job offer from the nonprofit group Indigenized Energy, she leapt at the chance. She started by doing community outreach for a $4 million federal grant–funded effort to bring solar to tribal homes and schools. But a much bigger opportunity opened up in 2024, when the Indigenized Energy team joined a five-state, 14-tribe coalition awarded $135.6 million from the Solar for All program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act.

The partners got to work quickly and were able to install two kickoff projects on tribal land in South Dakota and northern Montana. Some of those projects included batteries to provide resiliency against blackouts. One elderly woman in Montana equipped with a solar-battery system didn’t even realize the grid had gone out during a storm last winter, Brady said. ​“The battery kicked in, and the system was sized right to keep her house powered.”

But Brady lost her job this summer, after the Environmental Protection Agency clawed back the entirety of $7 billion in Solar for All funds — including Indigenized Energy’s grant. Legal challenges against this and other Trump administration rescissions of federal clean-energy funding are underway.

In the meantime, however, the six tribal-focused consortiums that received a total of $504 million in Solar for All funding, including the Tanana Chiefs Conference in Alaska, the Hopi Utilities Corp. in Arizona, and multi-tribal coalitions in the upper Midwest and Northern Plains, have had little choice but to delay projects that require ongoing federal reimbursement — and to lay off workers they can’t afford to pay, like Brady.

“There was money in there for weatherization, for roof replacements, for heat pumps, for a lot of different things to help people,” she said. ​“After being laid off, I still have people who reach out, and I try to help them as best I can, to point them in the direction of people who may have more answers.”

Tribal communities look to move beyond funding betrayal 

Across the country, tribal clean energy groups that have had federal funding taken away by the Trump administration are struggling with similar challenges — and looking for ways to salvage the work they’ve already begun.

Under the Biden administration, billions of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were directed to tribal projects. Now, significant portions of that funding have been canceled, including Solar for All grants, EPA environmental and climate justice block grants, and U.S. Department of Energy grants for microgrids.

Soon, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans in Congress last year, will strip tax credits for solar and wind projects unless they begin construction by this summer or are completed by 2027.

“Tribes are in a really tough place,” Cody Two Bears, the CEO of Indigenized Energy and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said during a November press event. He went on to note, ​“These incentives were put in place through the Biden administration … to really help communities like mine really flourish economic development–wise and job creation–wise while using renewable energy and alternative energy. And I think that was the vision until this new administration came in and took it all away.”

That money was aimed at addressing the inequities in energy access and affordability for tribal communities, which ​“suffer from higher-than-average electricity reliability issues, compounded by higher-than-average poverty levels and higher-than-average inadequate housing,” according to a 2023 DOE report.

Roughly 54,000 tribal members live in homes that aren’t connected to the grid, the report found. Many of those households that do get grid power spend disproportionately on energy.

At the same time, tribal lands have enormous solar and wind energy potential, according to a 2018 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. A growing number of tribes are pushing to unlock investment in those resources — even without the support of the federal government.

“We have connections with a lot of different investors willing to put up the capital,” said Clara Pratte, a member of the Navajo Nation and co-founder and president of Navajo Power, a nonprofit that plans to develop up to 750 megawatts of solar and battery storage in the Navajo Nation. ​“It’s just about getting them to a place of comfort, where they can tell their investors they’re putting their money into something that’s relatively low risk.”

Finding ways to salvage projects robbed of federal funding by the Trump administration is now a top priority for Chéri Smith, president and CEO of the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, which works with tribes, foundations, and clean energy financiers.

Smith, a descendant of the Mi’kmaq Tribe of present-day Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces, said the alliance had worked directly with tribes to secure more than $480 million in federal funding for clean energy projects in 2024. ​“I’d say 85% of it has been clawed back. The scale of this disruption is undeniable. But we have to do something. We can’t just sit there.”

For Smith, the loss of Solar for All grants was particularly painful. They were expected to enable hundreds of megawatts of new solar and battery systems while also boosting tribes’ workforce training, project development capacity, and utility infrastructure.

With federal funding yanked, ​“tribes were left with stalled projects, and the risk of losing all that planning,” she said. ​“We see ourselves as partners that can help preserve that progress and keep that momentum moving forward, even if it’s at a smaller scale or will take longer.”

Bridge financing can keep projects from dying on the vine

Filling this financing gap is where entities like the Indigenous Power & Light Fund can step in.

A collaboration between the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy and major philanthropies, the Indigenous Power & Light Fund launched in September 2024 with the goal of raising $100 million in three years; it has secured just under $40 million to date. With federal funding cuts impacting many sectors, donors have shifted limited capital reserves to other pressing needs.

The fund is now performing ​“triage” to determine which projects it can support, Smith said. It’s offering zero-interest and low-interest loans of up to $1 million and recoverable grants of up to $500,000 apiece.

Todd Halvorsen, the alliance’s head of energy finance and structuring and a clean energy developer with decades of experience at Solar Power Partners and NRG Energy, identified ​“development capital” as a key target. This stage of finance ​“is the hardest to source and the most expensive,” he said, since it must be provided before projects have a clear line of sight on revenues.

As an example, Halvorsen pointed to the fund’s $250,000 bridge loan to a project serving the Metlakatla Indian Community, on Annette Island in southeast Alaska. Metlakatla Power & Light, the utility owned and operated by the tribe, has won millions in grants to retrofit existing hydropower projects, build new wind power and batteries, and bring electric buses to the community, all to replace costly diesel generators and buses.

The project relied on building an underwater power line between the island and the city of Ketchikan to transfer power, Halvorsen said — and a gap in financing to pay the company laying that cable had put the project at risk. The loan from the alliance allowed the cable to be deployed last year, he said.

That, in turn, enabled Native Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), including the Native American Bank and Oweesta Corp., to close a $5.2 million bridge loan to move the project to its next stage of development. Halvorsen described these groups as ​“critical” partners.

But Native CDFIs have also been harmed by the Trump administration.

The Native CDFI Network, a coalition serving tribal communities, in 2024 won a $400 million grant from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the $20 billion ​“green bank” program created by the Inflation Reduction Act. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin froze that funding in early 2025, and legal challenges to reverse that decision suffered a setback in September when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed a lower court’s injunction on the frozen funds.

“Everyone’s reeling from the changes that have happened at the federal government,” said Alexander ​“Brave Journey” Sterling, CEO of Turtle Island Community Capital, a nonprofit that works with tribal groups in New England and the Eastern Seaboard. ​“There are a ton of projects in preengineering or early stages of procurement that are basically ready to go but need funding.”

In October, Turtle Island won a small amount of grant funding from the Tamalpais Trust, with underwriting and support from Oweesta. Sterling hopes to put that money toward early-stage work, such as technical assistance for tribal projects to do site surveys or community outreach.

Projects that have lost grant funding can offer sound long-term economic benefits for investors and tribes alike, Halvorsen said. Metlakatla Power & Light expects to save about $910,000 per year in energy costs by supplanting diesel fuel with carbon-free energy, for example.

But replacing grant funding with debt and equity investment can be complicated. The Indigenous Power & Light Fund is working with some of the tribal consortiums that have been denied their Solar for All funding, though it hasn’t announced any financing structures to date.

“Communities are having to refocus on building the capital stack to get projects together, to shift to cash-flowing projects,” Halvorsen said. ​“But there are no other options right now, other than hopes and prayers and lawsuits.”

Developing clean energy to build tribal economic prosperity

Tribes are also fighting to secure their fair share of the wealth that clean energy developments can generate. That’s a legitimate concern, given the history of exploitation of tribal fossil fuel resources.

“The Navajo Nation really saw exploitative relationships with coal mines and power companies,” said Pratte of Navajo Power. ​“We know these for-profit entities are there to make a profit for their shareholders. But we can be clear-minded about how we work with them to enable our goals.”

Enabling tribes to own their own energy resources and create their own utilities and energy authorities is central to meeting those goals, said Robert Blake, a tribal citizen of the Red Lake Nation of Ojibwe people.

Native Sun Community Power Development, the nonprofit Blake founded, is working on these kinds of projects, such as the partnership between the Red Lake Nation and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which are collaborating with Minnesota-based Open Access Technology International to install and operate EV chargers.

“We know that poverty is at the heart of all these problems communities face,” he said. ​“If we can battle these social ills through jobs, careers, and economic development opportunities, these communities have assets now … You can sit down and negotiate with the local utility.”

Tribes also need to build workforce and project development capacity to ensure they can expand and maintain projects after outside funders move on, said Two Bears of Indigenized Energy. His group partnered with solar installation company Freedom Forever to train and employ tribal workers for the projects it built using DOE funds.

“Many of them have been given solar jobs outside their reservation and come back to do work in their communities,” such as restoring malfunctioning solar power systems installed at the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, he said. ​“Because of their training and expertise, they were able to fix them themselves and not have to reach out for outside contractors.”

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has also left tribal training programs for solar jobs in the lurch.

Two Bears cited the example of Red Cloud Renewable, a 2-decade-old energy efficiency and solar installation training center on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska, which has trained more than 1,000 students, including Donica Brady.

“Solar for All was a great initiative,” said Chief Henry Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota Nation, the center’s executive director. As part of a plan designed by the 14 tribes that had won funding under the program, ​“we were given the green light — ​‘Go ahead and send your people out to Red Cloud, get the training you need.’”

After Solar for All was canceled, the training center scrambled to secure outside funding for about $160,000 in costs it couldn’t recover from the federal government, he said. ​“If it wasn’t for the funders, we wouldn’t have been able to pull that off.”

The Solar for All program is currently held up in court, and legal challenges to restore funding face an uphill battle. Blake, whose company Solar Bear led construction of the first two solar installations on the Red Lake Nation, isn’t waiting for court challenges to free up money frozen by the Trump administration.

Either way, ​“all this work needs to be done,” he said. ​“Energy prices will keep rising. Renewable energy technology will only get better and cheaper. And climate change isn’t going anywhere.”

Brady, who has since landed a job as a solar-project scheduling coordinator with Freedom Forever, said she’s not giving up on clean energy, either.

“This isn’t the first time the federal government has gone back on things. You consider the history of Native Americans and broken treaties,” she said. But ​“Northern Cheyennes are like the buffalo. We don’t run away from storms like every other animal. We turn and face the storm.”