For years, Jason Grimm filled his pickup truck with coolers to deliver poultry, potatoes and dry beans from his farm in Williamsburg, Iowa, to nearby restaurants.
The pickup truck worked for short-distance deliveries, but his goal of expanding his business by delivering frozen poultry deeper into central Iowa hinged on a better system.
“If we wanted to make an expansion into central Iowa or Des Moines, or even further away, like central Ames, we need a truck — a vehicle that can maintain a freezer or cooler temperature to deliver products,” he said.
So when Grimm discovered federal grants could help him purchase a new delivery truck with a built-in freezer, he jumped at the opportunity.
Through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Grimm received a $50,000 Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure grant for a delivery vehicle to help transport the farm’s goods. The USDA promised reimbursement for Grimm and 23 other similar program grant recipients in Iowa.
But President Donald Trump’s recent pause on federal funding for many projects nationwide has Grimm hesitant to purchase the new truck.
“We could go ahead and purchase something, but we don't know how long it would take us to get reimbursed,” Grimm said. “We're hesitant on putting that money out there.”
Hesitant to spend
Even as the Trump administration lifts some freezes on federal funding, there is still widespread uncertainty, leaving many agricultural projects on hold.
Grimm is one of many farmers and other federal grant recipients across the U.S. who are unsure about where the funding for their projects stands.
In his first days back in office, Trump signed a slew of executive orders directing an immediate pause on disbursement of funds throughout the country.
One such executive order, titled Unleashing American Energy, halted all grants issued through former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The act promised an estimated $3 billion in grants touching Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska, according to data from Atlas Public Policy, a data analytics and research firm.
Those projects funded by the act range from urban to rural and aim to reimburse cities, organizations and individuals who make improvements that could benefit the environment.
On Feb. 20, the USDA announced the federal government released $20 million of frozen Inflation Reduction Act funds. Much of that funding was for the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, which sent millions of dollars to Midwestern farmers for projects like drought-friendly irrigation for ranches.
However, Mike Lavender, a policy director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the newly released funds are a fraction of the total farmers are still waiting on across the country.
“Our best estimate is that that's roughly 1% of the overall amount of money that's been paused just within two programs impacted by the Inflation Reduction Act,” Lavender said.
The USDA said more announcements about funding are forthcoming, as the agency continues to review IRA funding, “to ensure that programs are focused on supporting farmers and ranchers, not DEIA programs or far-left climate programs.”
The lack of movement troubles Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government — an organization of lawyers based in Washington, D.C., working to “protect and strengthen democratic institutions.”
Blanchard said the Trump administration’s decision to largely ignore a federal judge’s order to release the funding may lead to critical services throughout the country ceasing.
“Many of these organizations do not have the financial buffer to keep going — they will have to close their doors,” Blanchard said. “Critical food services in food scarce areas won't get the services they need, critical air quality monitoring and protections for metro areas where children have very, very high rates of asthma will not get their critical funding.”
Programs at risk
The pauses reach far beyond farms. Some funds aimed to aid rural communities remain in doubt.
In Kansas, the nonprofit Healthy Bourbon County Action Team received a $2.9 million grant funded with Inflation Reduction Act dollars.
Through a partnership with University of Kansas and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the organization hired a community health worker for Bourbon, Crawford, Cowley and Mitchell counties to work on job development and health outcomes in the area.
But Judy Love, founder of the action team, said communication about the grant paused after Trump's executive order, throwing the future of the program into doubt. As of Feb. 25, Love hadn’t heard from the EPA liaison in charge of the grant funding after sending several emails.
“We just want to be allowed to help,” she said.
Love said financial support is hard to come by in rural Kansas, so federal funding is often the best route for her organization. And the region needs it, she said. In the past two years, the local hospital shuttered its emergency room and several businesses in the area closed their doors.
“Our work that we're doing has real outcomes — it's not like we're just throwing sticks in the air and hoping they land as a house,” Love said. “We are seeing people who become self-sustainable. We are seeing people get enrolled in workforce development and growing their career opportunities and we are seeing people build businesses.”
Overall, the funding freeze is having a disproportionate effect in rural communities, said Brian Depew, the executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs.
“A large portion of the funding in the IRA for clean energy is going to projects that are in rural communities,” Depew said. “Conservation projects, solar projects, projects of that nature tend to be located in rural areas, and so there's been a disproportionate freeze impact from that.”
Solar projects at stake
Some of the more sizable funding allocations under the Inflation Reduction Act were slated for solar energy projects, including the Solar For All program, which devoted multi-million dollar grants for solar panels in disadvantaged communities.
In Nebraska, the Center for Rural Affairs received an almost $62.5 million grant to build solar systems across the state, focusing on low-income households and a set-aside for Nebraska Tribes.
Since Trump took over, that money has been in a back-and-forth cycle, frozen and unfrozen, Depew said.
“The on-and-off access to the funding has made it very difficult for us to plan projects,” Depew said. “We had to put a pause on hiring of staff and put a pause on calls for contractors, and we're just now assessing whether it's feasible to resume those things.”
While Nebraska's funding is again accessible, in Missouri $156 million for Solar For All remains in limbo.
Renew Missouri, a clean energy advocacy group, was part of the stakeholder process for the project. Executive Director James Owen said in recent weeks, a planning meeting was canceled and he was told the portal with the money for the project was completely shut off, causing the state to stop its work.
In all, Missouri is set to receive what Owen called a transformative amount from the Inflation Reduction Act — more than $820 million in grants, plus even more for tax breaks and loans.
“Simply put, I think the Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to help transform the country's power sources from dirty power to clean energy,” Owen said. “I think that also includes the potential for Missouri as well, and I think that very much is in question now.”
In Nebraska, Depew is calling on Congress to exercise its power of the purse and uphold its obligations.
“To the extent that the agencies of the administration are canceling contracts or freezing funds, they are going against what Congress indicated should be done with this money, and so it's Congress that should stand up and make sure they protect the funds that they appropriated,” Depew said.
Owen also said he hopes Congress will start acting like a co-equal branch of government again. But after watching how all of this funding was so easily called into question in the first weeks of a new presidential administration, he’s frustrated with the Democrats who were in charge of implementing the law.
"I think the Biden administration was trying to time this to where the money was going to come at about the time people were going to start voting, and I think that was way too late,” he added. “I think there was a deliberate political effort to get this money at a certain time, and I think that turned out to be a failure, strategically."
Ignoring court orders
U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ordered the immediate release of the federal funding, including the Inflation Reduction Act funds, on Feb. 10.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration on Feb. 13 over the frozen Inflation Reduction Act funds. Shapiro, a Democrat, said Trump’s Unleashing American Energy order to “unilaterally and arbitrarily” suspend agencies access to congressionally appropriated grant funds.
“The lawyers of this country are paying attention, the American people who are being harmed by this are paying attention, and we're all very concerned and looking to our local elected leaders to make sure they have a backbone and stand up to protect the Constitution,” Blanchard said.
The American Bar Association released a statement criticizing the Trump administration decision to halt funds and dismiss employees with “little regard for the law.” The organization later criticized high-ranking Trump officials questioning the court's legitimacy.
In a social media post earlier this month, Vice President J.D. Vance questioned the authority of the judicial branch over the executive branch — specifically the court challenges over Trump's executive orders.
"If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general on how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal," he said in a post on X.
Blanchard, the vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, said the Trump administration and Vance’s post questioning the courts could be a sign the country is headed toward a “constitutional crisis.”
“Our Constitution has a separation of powers in order to keep a balance of powers so that we don't live under a dictatorship,” Blanchard said. “Any suggestion by this executive that they get to reinterpret what the judiciary or the court system has had to say about it is very concerning.”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
METHODS
To tell this story, Harvest Public Media and St. Louis Public Radio reporter Kate Grumke and Midwest Newsroom reporter Kavahn Mansouri made dozens of phone calls to recipients of federal grants throughout Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska to ask them about how President Donald Trump’s federal funding freezes affected them. They also interviewed experts and advocates about what the funding pauses mean in a wider context for farmers, nonprofits and otherwise that depend on the funds.
REFERENCES
“American Bar Association supports the rules of law” (American Bar Association website | Feb. 10, 2025)
“Unleashing American Energy - Executive Order” (White House website | Jan. 20, 2025)
“Secretary Rollins Releases the First Tranche of Funding Under Review" (U.S. Department of Agriculture website | Feb. 20, 2025)
“Secretary Naig Announces Investments in 24 Iowa Projects through the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure Program” (Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship website | Nov. 26, 2024)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News: Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
