Newark climate activists have their backs against the wall as the federal government guts funding
This [two-part] series was produced as part of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University’s 2025 NJ News Commons Investigative Reporting Initiative, and supported with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
In Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, Gustavo Alcocer had a blueprint for what resilience could look like. Through the Ironbound Community Corporation, he had secured a $19.3 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to build a microgrid—a network of battery storage, electric vehicle charging stations, and solar panels that would inject clean energy into one of New Jersey’s most polluted zip codes, 07105.
Like in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the plan for Newark’s microgrid was not to replace the city’s power infrastructure, but to complement it and make it more environmentally-friendly and affordable. In Euclid, an area of Cleveland, a microgrid project was funded in order to prevent power outages due to bad weather. Alcocer said Newark could use that as well, and that charged batteries could be disconnected and moved to emergency hubs to keep the lights on, including in schools, hospitals, and senior housing in such cases. But the microgrid envisioned would have also helped if, for instance, the air quality index spiked from the thousand diesel trucks barreling through the Ironbound neighborhood every hour. It could have presented not only a chance for cleaner air, but also a revenue generating opportunity for the city.
The microgrid project was also designed as a partnership with the City of Newark's Office of Sustainability, and it carried a larger ambition: proving that energy could be provided without fossil fuel production or sacrificing equity in a community already hosting three active power plants, amassive trash incinerator, and heavy metallic industry. "It would [have proved] that we can have that electricity aspect," Alcocer said, "without forcing more pollution into our community."
The grant started in January 2025, which coincided with the installment of the second Trump administration. Almost immediately, the Ironbound Community Corporation began experiencing freezes on the federal payment platform that prevented them from accessing funds, setting up contractor relationships, or moving forward with construction permits. The termination letter arrived on May 2, 2025. In total, the organization received less than one percent of the $19.3 million promised. The microgrid was never built.
Alcocer and his organization are not the only ones facing similar challenges as a consequence of President Trump’s federal funding cuts which began last spring. The ripple effects are continuing to be felt and environmental justice advocates and community organizers in Newark are having to redefine the way they speak about their work and how they approach city and state governments in order to keep fighting for healthy and safe living and working conditions for the city.
As the federal government scales back environmental justice initiatives—punctuated by the effective closure of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and the rollback of core NEPA regulations—its communities that are bearing the burden.
The scale of the financial retreat is staggering. In March 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled more than 400 grants totaling $1.7 billion—funding earmarked for air and water quality improvements in disadvantaged communities. By October, the Department of Energy terminated $7.56 billion in awards to 223 clean energy projects across 16 states that voted Democratic in 2024; New Jersey and Delaware alone stood to lose approximately $43.5 million.
Separately, the agency ended the $7 billion Solar for All program, which had allocated $156 million to New Jersey for rooftop solar in underserved areas. That program would have also set aside $86 million to entice private sector solar developers to establish projects which would have resulted in at least 20 percent savings on electricity bills and another $18 million to help developers put 5,000 more families in public and affordable housing on the solar grid, per Inside Climate News At the state level, New Jersey lawmakers also diverted $190 million from the state’s Clean Energy Fund for the 17th consecutive year, while a December 2025 report documented a 13 percent decline in staffing at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection over the past decade.
For cities like Newark, already burdened by heavy industrial zoning, aging infrastructure, and severe climate vulnerabilities, these rollbacks present political challenges and economic hinderances to the ongoing climate justice fight for a cleaner environment.
The scale of the financial retreat is staggering. In March 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled more than 400 grants totaling $1.7 billion—funding earmarked for air and water quality improvements in disadvantaged communities. By October, the Department of Energy terminated $7.56 billion in awards to 223 clean energy projects across 16 states that voted Democratic in 2024; New Jersey and Delaware alone stood to lose approximately $43.5 million.
Separately, the agency ended the $7 billion Solar for All program, which had allocated $156 million to New Jersey for rooftop solar in underserved areas. That program would have also set aside $86 million to entice private sector solar developers to establish projects which would have resulted in at least 20 percent savings on electricity bills and another $18 million to help developers put 5,000 more families in public and affordable housing on the solar grid, per Inside Climate News At the state level, New Jersey lawmakers also diverted $190 million from the state’s Clean Energy Fund for the 17th consecutive year, while a December 2025 report documented a 13 percent decline in staffing at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection over the past decade.
For cities like Newark, already burdened by heavy industrial zoning, aging infrastructure, and severe climate vulnerabilities, these rollbacks present political challenges and economic hindrances to the ongoing climate justice fight for a cleaner environment.
Newark’s compounding crises
The federal cutbacks come at a time when the city is already dealing with compounding crises in its working class neighborhoods. “Why does our community have to bear the brunt of all of the environmental injustice?” Alcocer asked.
The health disparities in Newark are just one stark factor of the environmental justice puzzle. While asthma rates in some suburban New Jersey communities sit at roughly one in ten, in Newark one in four children suffer from the respiratory condition - largely driven by diesel trucks and industry tied to the Port of New York and New Jersey and nearby Newark Liberty International Airport.
When children are the ones most impacted, so are their parents who are often working hourly wage jobs with limited paid time off, if any at all. Children forced to stay home from school or daycare, doctors appointments, the cost of medicine, pollutants from new construction - all factor in as part of a socioeconomic issue in neighborhoods around Dayton Street and Ironbound, among others.
Clean air is not the only issue, the water is as well.
According to flood maps, the entire Dayton Street neighborhood—a predominantly low-income area in the South Ward—is projected to be entirely underwater by 2035. Meanwhile, the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission is attempting to build a new power plant in the neighborhood, and organizations, residents, and advocates are lobbying state legislators to regulate scrap metal facilities, which burn materials in residential areas but fall outside waste management regulations, limiting the Department of Environmental Protection’s authority to intervene.
The Federal retreat and the philanthropic pivot
The search for funding to replace money cut by the government has introduced its own frustrations on top of these existing issues: private funders want narrow technical experiments rather than the holistic community mission the project was designed to serve. “Being funder aligned to our original intention, that is to help the well being of our community members in more rounded ways, is a challenge,” Alcocer said.
The South Ward Environmental Alliance lost two and a half years of remaining funding from a five-year federal environmental justice grant. The organization had also applied for roughly $350,000 through a separate grant administered by Fordham University—funding that was frozen before it could be awarded. “We’re in our early stages of growth,” said Kim Gaddy, the alliance’s founder. “When you were able to kick certain things into gear, you kind of got to now slow up because of funding.”
At one particularly prominent family foundation, which frequently partners with local New Jersey organizers, staff who wished to remain anonymous have been instructed to divert their focus away from the Northeast and concentrate solely on West Coast environmental justice issues. “Why? Because the funders want it,” a staffer noted.
With federal grants drying up, local groups are turning toward private philanthropy—but this pivot comes with a steep ideological cost. Amy Goldsmith, New Jersey State Director of Clean Water Action, said foundations that long supported environmental work are now redirecting their resources.
“We’ve had funders who have funded us and supported us for eons, in part because of the EJ work that we do, but they’ve decided that they’re going to put all of their resources into wealth equity, into housing, which they never did, ever before,” Goldsmith said.
She described making the case to one of the nation’s largest private foundations that cleaning the air and electrifying the ports could reduce childhood asthma rates—and was met with institutional resistance. “Every healthcare funder I talked to—it’s like, ‘I understand what you’re saying, but we can’t fund that,’” she said.
Goldsmith and her allies are pushing state-level solutions to fill the federal vacuum, including a “Climate Superfund” bill that would compel major oil companies to pay for climate damage, directing 51 percent of funds to environmental justice communities. “We have to look for remedies at the state level when the state is broke because the Feds won’t give Democratic states money,” Goldsmith said.
To survive, advocates are engaging in what Christian Rodriguez, a Newark consultant and grant writer working with the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance described as “contortion work.”
“We have had to change the way we worded things so that it’s not flagged,” explained Rodriguez. “We can’t use ‘frontline communities’ or like ‘people of color.’ We just have to be very general.” Instead of ‘environmental justice,’ the work is being repackaged as “climate resiliency,” “energy,” and “public health,” the foundation staffer commented.
Goldsmith said the broader political assault on diversity and inclusion initiatives has made even the phrase “environmental justice” radioactive. “It’s become like a bad word,” she said. “People don’t even want to talk about it. Some people don’t even write it in their proposals.”
The future of the fight
Local organizers, academic allies, and neighborhood activists are being forced to execute a rapid strategic pivot: searching for new funding streams, battling developers over community benefits, and radically changing their vocabulary just to keep their neighborhoods safe. This is despite New Jersey having specific, statewide environmental justice laws in place.
“Just because the funding is not available, that doesn’t mean that the pollution is going to stop,” Rodriguez said. “We have to figure out a way on how do we keep pushing, keep moving, keep the community involved.”
Goldsmith framed the stakes bluntly. “If we gave protections to people in overburdened communities, everybody would be better protected,” she said. “But that’s not their narrative. Their narrative is to divide.”
Alcocer, still fighting to salvage his microgrid, said the loss underscores what is at stake. “We keep facing another project after another that is going to be increasing pollution,” he said. “Clean energy production and getting away from fossil fuel infrastructure is going to be a very, very big, important step that we’re going to have to take collectively.”
“We’ve always been resilient, and so nothing can stop us,” Rodriguez affirmed. “We’re still going to figure things out, because it’s important to our community.”
