Trump’s EPA Kills Grant to Climate Nonprofit Over Its Support for Palestine
In a tweet announcing his attack on the Climate Justice Alliance, EPA head Lee Zeldin linked it to the group’s protected speech about Palestine.
The real poison isn't red vs blue team theatrics—it’s the structural trap where radical groups get neutered chasing state dollars, then cry persecution when the cage door slams. Biden’s delay wasn’t bureaucratic inertia; it was a loyalty test failed by CJA’s refusal to decouple climate collapse from imperial plunder.
Zeldin’s performative cancellation merely weaponized the compliance mechanisms baked into federal grant systems. State-approved dissent dies the moment it names the empire’s resource wars as root causes. Your grant application is your muzzle.
radical groups
I think it's bad they got their funding taken away, but I'm not gonna pretend this group was a radical group. Saying Free Palestine and doing climate change advocacy might be radical to Americans, but both of those things are only advocacy.
In response to the escalating climate disasters that our member groups are experiencing on the ground in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and North Carolina, the Climate Justice Alliance works with frontline groups on the ground to assess and rebuild with a collective vision for a Just Recovery. We are tracking ways to support frontline communities on the ground in the regions impacted by these climate disasters. We are also working with local grassroots groups and networks to provide crucial resources and support to those in immediate need.
Frontline leaders within CJA’s membership are modeling Food Sovereignty as an essential part of a Just Transition to healthy, resilient communities and a regenerative economy through the practice and scaling out of agroecology – a science, a practice, and a movement centered on growing food in harmony with ecological systems.
It Takes Roots utilizes the common frame to protect our land, water, homes, and bodies. We engage in both trans-local power building and mass mobilizations. We come together to share tools, exercise power, and engage a rapid response committed to building resistance and visionary opposition to oppression, extraction, and exploitation.
Currently, with thirty-four active Our Power Communities, our goal is to create living examples of how communities can put people to work transforming their localities, while reducing both cost and pollution burden for present and future generations. These local living economic models are being built through Just Transition. Our Power Communities (OPC’s) bring together the different sectors of a community to fight the bad and build the new.
Reinvest in Our Power is a collaborative effort led by CJA to address inequity and democratize wealth by moving capital and governance from the extractive to regenerative economy. By leveraging momentum and political power, RiOP, including CJA member groups, is moving money into The Financial Cooperative, a democratically-governed cooperative of local, non-extractive revolving loan funds that invest in projects owned/operated by frontline communities to build economic democracy rooted in ecological integrity.
https://climatejusticealliance.org/
Nothing they are doing is outside of the current system and everything they are doing requires grant money and donations to function in the capacity that they do. There was no "structural trap". The organization needs state dollars to function, they lost $50 million dollars from this (that is a lot of money for a "grassroots" organization) people would largely not be willing to donate the money needed for this organization to be functional in it's current capacity. Maybe now that they have lost the grants they will be able to fundraise enough to keep functioning, but the organization was never "radical" to begin with. Radical groups (at least radical US leftist groups*) are not being given $50 million dollars by the US government.
The term "radical" has been so thoroughly diluted that it now serves more as a rhetorical cudgel than an accurate descriptor. The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is not radical; it’s a cog in the empire’s greenwashing machine. They operate within the confines of the system, reliant on state dollars and philanthropic scraps to maintain their operations. Losing $50 million in grants isn’t oppression—it’s a recalibration of dependency.
True radicalism doesn’t beg for permission or funding from the very structures it seeks to dismantle. If anything, this situation underscores how tightly controlled dissent is when tethered to state-approved narratives. The moment you rely on the empire’s purse strings, you’re playing by its rules. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.
God forbid the chains of earning a living and feeding your family.
