On Valentine’s Day evening, scientists at Mississippi State University’s Coastal Conservation and Restoration Lab in Biloxi received a letter from the federal government with disheartening news. Effective immediately, the lab would lose access to a grant funding its Native Plant Producers Network—a year-old initiative training students and other volunteers to grow saltmarsh plants for coastal restoration projects.

The federal grant, which would have awarded CCR nearly $700,000 over three years, had allowed the lab to involve local schools in shoreline restoration and establish multiple growing sites along the Gulf Coast. The letter stated that the government had canceled the funding because it did not align with the new presidential administration’s priorities.

“We didn’t hear anything from anybody until that letter,” Eric Sparks, the head of CCR and director of MSU’s Coastal and Marine Extension program, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 19, noting that the grant’s termination blindsided him and his staff. “We feel like we’re abandoning the community that we’ve built around this.”

CCR is not the only conservation program that has lost critical funding since the new administration took power. Six weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump has taken aggressive steps to curb federal climate spending and undermine government efforts to protect the environment.

Trump has issued executive orders targeting a wide range of policies and programs, from global climate agreements and industrial pollution restrictions to funding for clean energy projects and environmental justice initiatives.

At the same time, his administration has slashed the federal workforce overseeing the environment and related arenas, firing scientists and other experts in record numbers and installing officials prepared to enact Trump’s deregulatory agenda. Government agencies are bracing for additional cuts in the coming weeks.

Taken together, Trump’s climate actions in his first 45 days closely align with proposals laid out in Project 2025, a regulatory blueprint that the right-wing Heritage Foundation created to guide the new Republican administration’s governing and policymaking.

Though Trump sought to distance himself from the document during the 2024 presidential campaign due to its unpopularity (even though around 140 former Trump officials helped write it), the president tapped its chief architect to serve as White House budget director once he took office.

‘A Mandate From the American People’

Officials at Trump’s revamped Environmental Protection Agency say the president is delivering on his promise to eliminate wasteful government programs, equating environmental justice initiatives launched under the previous administration to the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts he has pledged to discontinue.

“EPA is working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,’ as well as subsequent associated implementation memos,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou told the Mississippi Free Press in an emailed statement. “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to do just this.”

Trump’s new EPA chief is Lee Zeldin, a longtime congressman with a record of voting in favor of the fossil fuel industry. During his confirmation hearings, Zeldin told senators that he believes climate change is “real,” but that he opposes regulations that hurt the economy. “We can and we must protect our precious environment without suffocating the economy,” he said.

Speaking with the Mississippi Free Press, environmental policy experts say the Trump White House has followed Project 2025’s proposed dismantling of climate regulations almost “to a T.”

“​​Unwinding climate policy from the U.S. federal government was clearly a priority for the new administration,” Courtney Federico, associate director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, said on Feb. 14. “We’ve seen them follow through on many of the policies that were included in Project 2025.”

The administration’s attacks on environmental justice and weekslong freeze on climate-related loans and grants are being felt in Mississippi, where some organizations still cannot access funding for key sustainability projects. Experts worry the absence of these funds will imperil public health and worsen inequities in the state, putting communities disproportionately affected by climate change at even greater risk.

“The funding freeze, no doubt, will hit hardest in working-class, low-income, Black, Latino and indigenous communities, where we know people have limited access to clean water and disproportionate exposure to deadly pollution,” Cathleen Kelly, Federico’s colleague at CAP and a senior fellow for energy and environment, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 14. “We all heard Donald Trump promise to deliver the cleanest air and water on the planet, but instead we’ve seen EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wholeheartedly implement Project 2025 and its plan to weaken public health and environmental protections.”

Delivering on Project 2025

Trump has spent the past six weeks reversing government efforts to address climate change, rolling back policies to rein in carbon emissions and halting investments in greener alternatives. 

Hours after being sworn in, the president began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the 2016 Paris Agreement, repeating a controversial move from his first term and fulfilling a key Project 2025 directive in the process. Pulling out of the accord—under which countries agree to collectively curb climate pollution—is especially dangerous this time around since U.S. emissions are likely to skyrocket under the new administration, climate policy experts warn.

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement “limits the leverage of other countries to hold the United States accountable,” CAP’s Courtney Federico explained. “The fact that the largest historical (greenhouse gas) emitter, which is us, is no longer at the table when it comes to international climate negotiations impacts the whole world.”

In addition to scrapping climate policies and funding for developing nations, Trump has moved to ramp up fossil fuel production in the U.S.—another core component of Project 2025’s deregulatory playbook. The president declared a national emergency to maximize oil and gas manufacturing on home soil, directing federal agencies to expand drilling on public lands and oceans as well as private property through the use of eminent domain.

“They’ve basically taken the stance of, ‘We are going to open up as much of our public lands as possible to drilling and fracking … and we are going to eliminate every regulation possible that the fossil fuel industry doesn’t like,’” Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy at Sierra Club, told the Mississippi Free Press on Feb. 21.

He and other experts described Trump’s energy agenda as a boon for industrial polluters, highlighting the many political appointees in the new administration with ties to oil and gas producers.

Following through on Trump’s energy objectives would require gutting landmark environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, a process Drupp predicted would result in litigation. The EPA is already pressing the White House to strike down the “Endangerment Finding”—a 2009 determination permitting the government to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act by concluding that they jeopardize public health.

“Those bedrock laws have always been the thing that has allowed vulnerable communities to protect themselves,” Drupp said. “Obviously, they’re not being very transparent, because they know rolling back (things like) air pollution protections is not a popular thing to do.”

As Project 2025 instructed, Trump has used his executive powers to stifle the nation’s clean energy economy, suspending billions of dollars in federal funding earmarked for renewable energy projects and technologies. Much of that funding was made available through the Inflation Reduction Act, a mammoth spending package passed under the Biden administration that marked the nation’s largest-ever investment in green energy.

Distribution of Inflation Reduction Act funds has resumed in recent weeks after multiple judges ordered the White House to end its funding freeze. Some federal funds remain stalled, however, and the administration continued to withhold billions in EPA climate grants as of March 4.

Trump’s freeze on federal climate spending has had far-reaching consequences outside of Washington, D.C., delaying construction projects in vulnerable communities and forcing some organizations to lay off employees, multiple news outlets have reported. The freeze also threatens economic growth in Republican-led states like Mississippi, which have benefited most from Inflation Reduction Act funding.

“Clean energy investments, thanks to the incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act, are starting to revitalize communities,” Lucero Marquez, associate director for federal climate policy at the Center for American Progress, said on Feb. 14, noting these investments are projected to add $18 billion and around 130,000 jobs to Mississippi’s state economy through 2035. “Any attacks on these clean energy investments means there will be a loss of jobs and higher costs for Americans.”

Drupp says Trump’s mass dismissal of government workers could also prove catastrophic for the environment and those who depend on it. Laying off EPA scientists and top energy officials removes a critical barrier to Project 2025’s implementation, clearing a path for the new administration to further contaminate the nation’s air and water and endanger public safety, he said.

“They’ve been pretty successful in villainizing the federal workforce to a chunk of the

American public,” he explained. “People are about to find out just how much the federal workforce and civil servants actually do for them.”

Local Fallout

Trump’s push to clamp down on government climate spending has sparked alarm and confusion in Mississippi, a state that consistently sits near the bottom of the country’s environmental and public health rankings.

In Jackson, environmental nonprofit 2C Mississippi has been forced to delay green infrastructure development in a historic city district after the administration held up funding it received for the project. The $1.5 million grant, awarded to 2C last year through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Forest Service, was designed to be distributed through reimbursement, and the group spent months lining up contractors and preparing to begin construction this spring.

2C President and CEO Dominika Parry says she has communicated with National Forest Service staff who are “processing” the reimbursement. As of March 5, however, her organization had still not received the money.

“We filed for reimbursement and so far did not receive it. That is extremely nerve-wracking,” Parry said on Feb. 21, adding that she had been told the funds would be made available within a few days of filing. “We already spent the money … so if we do not get reimbursed soon, we will not be able to pay salaries and, of course, keep going with the project.”

The administration’s spending cuts have also affected education programs like Mississippi State University’s CRR Lab, where leaders are still processing the loss of funding for their plant-growing restoration initiative. CCR head Eric Sparks noted that the canceled grant was offered through a federal program promoting “equity in conservation education,” which the new administration classified as a DEI program.

“In the proposal (for this project), we mentioned that we would work in underserved communities … but that’s just where we live,” Sparks explained on Feb. 19. “It wasn’t like we were specifically targeting or specifically excluding anybody—we just happened to be doing it in underserved communities.”

Sparks and Parry both fear that eliminating federal funding for environmental projects will undo much of the progress Mississippi conservation programs have made in recent years. Though Sparks says he and his colleagues will try to keep the plant-growing network afloat through a patchwork of funding sources, he worries about the program’s long-term viability.

“We’re going to lose all the momentum on the stuff that was productive moving forward,” he said. “You can’t just build that back quick.”

Parry says she may have to shut down her organization if she cannot rely on federal funding moving forward. The administration’s weekslong hold on money she was promised—coupled with its broader assault on environmental justice spending and initiatives—has been so stressful that she might not try to revive 2C if it folds, she told the Mississippi Free Press.

“People are risking their daily well-being by working with me from funding that is not secured,” she said. “I don’t know if I will have it in me to ask people to risk it again.”