Laura Brion was supposed to spend Thursday preparing for the following day’s kickoff to a series of community lead safety workshops.
Instead, the executive director of Childhood Lead Action Project sat stiffly against the wooden benches of a dimly lit third-floor federal courtroom in Providence, listening to lawyers argue case law and legal theory as it relates to federal agencies’ distribution of congressionally approved grants and aid.
The Childhood Lead Action Project is one of the many nonprofits nationwide awarded funding under Biden-era spending packages, yet suddenly unable to access the money after President Donald Trump took office. Its $500,000 grant would have covered the cost of training for landlords and community health workers about lead safety laws and the ramifications of childhood lead poisoning. It would have also paid for one new employee — increasing the nonprofit’s small but mighty team from five to six people.
Now, Brion is stuck in limbo, unable to hire or prepare for workshops without any guarantee that the funding her organization was promised, and had started to draw down, would continue.
“I’ve managed a lot of federal grants in my career,” Brion said in an interview outside the courtroom. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before.”
She is not alone; thousands of nonprofits nationwide have had federal funds yanked out from underneath them, leading to canceled contracts, pauses on hiring and the threat of employee layoffs. So contends a lawsuit filed by a half-dozen nonprofits, including Rhode Island’s Childhood Lead Action Project, the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council and Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District.
This is about childhood lead poisoning, which we know is preventable. We have a signed grant award. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to do this.
The March 14 complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island has already amassed hundreds of pages of legal documents and exhibits from attorneys representing the nonprofits, as well as the federal agencies they are challenging. Thursday marked the first opportunity for each side to make their points in front of Rhode Island District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy.
The case echoes the many federal lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s executive actions and the loss of funding for research universities, state governments, arts organizations, and education, among others. The frenzy of legal action has cast new scrutiny on the powers of the executive branch.
This time, arguments hinged on a 1946 law that defined the powers and authorities of federal agencies.
Who’s got the power?
Lawyers with D.C. nonprofit Democracy Forward and Providence firm DeLuca, Weizenbaum, Barry & Ravens argued that federal agencies violated the Administrative Procedures Act by suddenly pausing grants and aid already awarded to nonprofits under Biden-era Congressional spending packages.
“There is no reasonable basis — the government has offered none — to freeze first and ask questions later,” Jessica Morton, senior counsel with Democracy Forward, said during arguments Thursday.
Morton also sought to differentiate the complaint from a January lawsuit in D.C. filed by a group of nonprofits affected by federal funding freezes. That complaint centered on general grants and aid, not specific awards made through Biden-era spending packages. The D.C. complaint is also limited to the Office of Management and Budget and its director; the Rhode Island case spans another half dozen federal agencies and cabinet members, including the Environmental Protection Agency and Departments of Agriculture and the Interior.
But Daniel Schwei, the U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the Trump administration, argued that the Rhode Island lawsuit was duplicative of its D.C. predecessor since the National Council for Nonprofits was a plaintiff in both cases.
After McElroy appeared unpersuaded by Schwei’s allegations of redundancy, he quickly moved on to his next defense: that there was never a broad funding freeze at all.
Schwei in court filings included testimony from the U.S. Department of Energy — one of the federal agencies named as defendants — confirming that it was no longer pausing access to federal funds for one of the case’s affected nonprofits as of late February. Two other nonprofits, the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council and the Green Infrastructure Center, were able to access U.S. Department of Agriculture grants as of March 31, according to court documents. The grants were paused at the time the lawsuit was filed.
“I don’t think there’s any proven basis for concluding these reviews are just indefinite pauses,” Schwei said. “The money is going out the door in some cases.”
Schwei focused much of his argument on legal doctrine around federal agency powers, citing, among other examples, a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court ruling concluding that there was no opportunity for judicial review in Congress’ decision to end its annual appropriation to the Indian Health Service.
“The fundamental question in this case is whether federal agencies, upon a new administration taking office, may pause federal funding and review it to ensure consistency with the president’s priorities,” Schwei said. “We think the answer is yes.”
McElroy, who interrupted Morton and Schwei multiple times with questions, sought to differentiate between federal spending generally allocated by Congress, and spending already awarded to specific individual recipients through competitive grants.
“At its fundamental level, this isn’t an issue of what the agencies are doing or what priorities they’re setting,” McElroy said. “The government is entitled to do that. The question is how, and what comes first: the freeze or the review?”
The three-hour hearing was heavy on legal doctrine and case law. But the consequences for nonprofits nationwide, and the communities they serve, are far more tangible.
“These laws support projects that keep children safe from lead exposure, renovate homes of low-income Americans to keep them safe from mold and carbon monoxide exposure, help family farms make the most of technology to stay in business, conserve irreplaceable natural resources, promote resilience in the face of natural disasters, support local economies, and much more,” attorneys for the nonprofits wrote in their March 17 complaint.
Years of work building trust and relationships with the communities they serve also took a major hit when funding was cut off, Morton said.
Stuck in limbo
When, or if, federal funding to the Childhood Lead Action Project is restored, it will be tough to recruit a new hire when candidates know the money that pays for their job might be turned off at any moment, Brion said in a written statement to the courts.
Alicia Lehrer, executive director of the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, was reluctant to resume the organization’s $1 million tree planting and community training initiative along the 7-mile Woonaquatucket Greenway, even though federal funds were unfrozen earlier this week.
“Right now, we’re not going ahead with anything major because we don’t know what we will have long-term,” Lehrer said, speaking outside the hearing. “This is a major, major project with a lot of planning and a lot of community partners. We have people we can’t let down.”
Lehrer was reluctant to comment on the courtroom hearing she had just watched play out. But, she acknowledged a feeling of disconnection between the legal battle and what she and other nonprofit leaders are facing in their daily lives.
Brion agreed.
“This is about childhood lead poisoning, which we know is preventable,” she said. “We have a signed grant award. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to do this.”
While Brion’s organization was not yet contemplating layoffs, a more imminent danger for other nonprofits named in the case, it was not out of the question.
“At this point, nothing is certain,” she said.
Lawyers for the nonprofits have asked McElroy to order federal agencies to release and resume any grant funding awarded based on Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act spending, not only for the plaintiffs in the case but for any grant recipients awarded money via the Biden administration spending packages.
McElroy did not indicate Thursday when she would issue an order, though she noted it would not be this week. Thursday afternoon she was scheduled to preside over a virtual hearing in another federal court case challenging the cutoff of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
