02/10/2025

Here's Who is Impacted as the Inflation Reduction Act is Frozen

A Day 1 executive order directed federal agencies to freeze IRA funding

More than two weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order pausing tens of billions of dollars in federal climate spending, the funding freeze is continuing to cause chaos and confusion for states and nonprofit groups across the country, despite lingering questions about its legality.

Federal agencies raced to dole out money from former president Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, during Biden’s final months in office, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on USAspending.gov. More than 99 percent of the payments that have been made and cannot be reversed were finalized in December.

But of $50 billion worth of grants awarded, the analysis found, only $18 billion has been paid out to recipients so far. The remaining $32 billion authorized under the 2022 law is now vulnerable to being frozen and pulled back. About $20.5 billion of the unspent money is from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to the federal data, which may be incomplete because grants are not consistently documented on the site.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.