New Haven joins lawsuit to unfreeze federal grant money for climate, environmental projects
March 24, 2025
New Haven joins lawsuit to unfreeze federal grant money for climate, environmental projects
The City of New Haven is suing the Trump administration to get their federal dollars. It joined a nationwide lawsuit last week after losing access to tens of millions of dollars in federal grants involving environmental and climate projects.
“We were awarded these funds. We have a contract,” New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker said.
There’s frustration in New Haven as the city finds some of their federal grant funding frozen by the Trump administration. Mayor Elicker says the city was supposed to get more than $30 million in grant funding from the Environmental Protection Agency for various projects. It includes helping residents move from oil heat to more sustainable heating pumps for their homes as well as moving people from gas to induction stoves.
“Our president is basically taking away wonderful opportunities for our community members to do the right thing and to save a lot of money,” he said.
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This comes after President Trump signed a series of executive orders aimed at stopping federal funds “not consistent with the president’s policies.” As a result, New Haven has joined a number of other cities in a nationwide lawsuit, aimed at halting the funding freeze.
“We’re joined by places like Nashville, Tennessee; Columbus, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin. So these are red states. They’re blue states,” Rep. Steve Winter said.
Rep. Winter says the grants were supposed to be reimbursable, as in the city would complete the projects before getting the money.
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“So the city has to incur costs and it’s not going to be comfortable doing that if we don’t think we’ll be reimbursed,” he said.
Mayor Elicker says the federal money include a $20 million Community Change Grant, which would fund various infrastructure projects such as bike lanes.
“If people want to save money on gas for their car, this grant would have helped them out because it funds more infrastructure on bicycles and people want more trees in their community,” he said.
He says binding contracts were signed already for the grants and that the freeze is constitutional overreach.
“The contract doesn’t say anything about how the president can unilaterally decide to just rip up the contract, but that is exactly what Donald Trump is doing,” he said.
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