Canceled EPA grant stalls Kotzebue wind project meant to cut diesel reliance
Kotzebue sits on a gravel spit jutting into Kotzebue Sound just north of the Arctic Circle, reachable only by air and sea. The northwest Alaska city has a three-month window each year to take delivery of all the diesel fuel it will use for the following year, because ice keeps freight barges away for most of the year. Diesel supplies 75 percent of the community’s power, and residents put about 20 percent of their income toward buying it — more than three times the average energy burden for low-income households nationwide.
Chad Nordlum, energy project manager for the Native Village of Kotzebue, told Grist that the community is “pretty much at the mercy of world markets.” “Right now, with the Iran war going on, the diesel prices are very high and we’re locked in to much higher prices than we’ve had in the past,” Nordlum said. “There’s really nothing the community can do about diesel prices, but what we can do is produce our own energy.”
A $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, announced in 2024, was meant to support a wind energy project in Kotzebue as part of a larger $150 million allocation for tribal infrastructure in Alaska. Nordlum said the funding would have lowered the community’s reliance on diesel to roughly 40 percent to 50 percent and given the tribe more control over energy and economic decisions. The Trump administration canceled the grant in May 2025, and more than a year later the project remains paused.
The cancellation was among hundreds of millions of dollars the Department of Government Efficiency pulled from Indian Country, according to the two Brookings Institution reports, and part of a broader pattern of funding rollbacks and underinvestment in Indigenous communities. The reports say the One Big Beautiful Bill Act killed many of the funding streams established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, while DOGE eliminated another $468 million — about half of it allocated for environmental and natural resources, and another 11 percent targeted at agriculture. The cut projects included climate resiliency plans, renewable energy projects, and jobs programs.
Despite the historic investments that flowed into Indian Country after the pandemic, a massive underinvestment in Indigenous communities continues, according to Brookings. The report authors say the underinvestment violates the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to tribes and hinders Indigenous efforts to protect the environment and address climate change. They are calling for policy changes that would ensure tribes receive funding regardless of political winds.
Rob Maxim, a fellow at Brookings Metro who is Mashpee Wampanoag, said climate and environmental funding is especially crucial for Indigenous communities because they are often the most severely impacted by climate change, particularly after years of underinvestment. “The actions that the Trump administration is taking are particularly significant, but it’s not totally out of trend with previous administrations,” Maxim said. “And what we wanted to show was that actually this underinvestment is kind of the default for the U.S. rather than a blip.”
The true aberration, the reports find, was the unprecedented level of post-pandemic funding, which came under the Biden administration and included more than $700 million in climate, energy, and infrastructure funding for tribes. The money covered projects such as the development of climate action plans and food systems analysis. The Hopi Tribe, for example, was set to receive a $25 million grant to install solar panels for 600 homes; that grant and the entire $7 billion Solar for All program were cut.
Maxim said funding for Indigenous communities is a federal obligation rooted in treaties and other agreements with tribes, and should be standard and irrevocable. “The funding that was flowing to Indian Country was not being done on the basis of race or DEI, and it was absolutely not illegal,” he said. “It was aimed at the promotion of tribal sovereignty and the well-being of tribal citizens and tribal communities, and so that is, you know, an obligation that the U.S. government maintains.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The EPA provided its comment several days after the report was first published Nov. 2. The Environmental Protection Agency said in an emailed statement that “the Trump EPA is committed to ensuring taxpayer dollars are being used appropriately and has reviewed all funding activities with that lens,” and that through its General Assistance Program and other granting programs it has awarded more than $351 million in tribal grants funding since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Glencora Haskins, a senior research associate and applied research manager at Brookings Metro, said the administration targeted funding to tribes, with “tribal” the most frequently flagged term. “I think that there was a very surface-level view of what a lot of these programs were doing, rather than any deep interrogation of the types of systemic infrastructure deficits that programs were trying to fix,” Haskins said.
Energy and infrastructure needs are especially acute in Native communities in Alaska and around the country, the reports note, because of increasingly frequent and destructive storms, wildfires, and other climate-driven disasters.
Haskins and Maxim recommend Congress pass legislation barring the cancellation of grants and contracts for tribes and stipulating that all funding for Indigenous nations and communities serves trust and treaty obligations even when it comes from a program with a different stated purpose. They also call for a statutory requirement that money flow directly to tribes rather than requiring them to seek reimbursement from the U.S. Treasury.
In Kotzebue, Nordlum said he hopes the political tide turns enough to get the wind project’s funding moving again. In the meantime, he is working on a smaller solar project he hopes will help ease the community’s energy challenges. “Our main goals are energy security and economic development for the tribe, which is ultimately being able to invest in our own community, help make the lives of people here a little more sustainable,” Nordlum said. “We want our community to continue on into the future. We have to get a handle on our energy prices and availability.”