Three days before Donald Trump returned to office, the Environmental Protection Agency approved a nearly $20 million grant to Thomasville, Georgia, to fix aging infrastructure in the city’s low-income neighborhoods that left the residents exposed to hazardous waste, radon, lead paint and polluted air.
In grant application documents, locals described “sewer backup in toilets and tubs or the smell of sewage” in their neighborhoods over the years. At the local Harper Elementary School, 12% of students have been diagnosed with asthma, the documents say. The school’s nurse believes that figure is a severe undercount.
Then came Trump’s DOGE.
DOGE listed those funds among its “waste” and added the total to its top-line “savings,” rescinding all the funds for Thomasville in May.
City officials have sought to appeal the grant’s cancellation and are exploring other funding sources. But the only recent change to Thomasville’s grant is that it’s been added to a new federal government list: DOGE’s “Greatest Hits” page.
“A curated roundup of the strangest, most baffling uses of government funding we’ve uncovered,” the new page reads, adding, “You can’t make this stuff up.”
The 33 grants listed as DOGE’s greatest hits range from addressing traffic congestion in New York to maternal morbidity research. What many of them have in common, though, is a focus or even a brief mention that the money benefits minority groups.
Almost all of the grants listed on DOGE’s “greatest hits” list have a single word or phrase in their title that appears to have been their death knell, such as “inclusive,” “racial equity,” “structural racism” or “transgender.”
An internal EPA flowchart reviewed by NOTUS asks whether the title or abstract of an award contains a certain set of words and phrases. The more than 100 keywords reviewed by NOTUS range from “biases,” “LGBT” and “sense of belonging” to “disability,” “minorities,” “black” and “women.” If the keywords are present and “implicate” the Day 1 executive order, the award is to be ended. If not, the flowchart directs the reader to repeat the process with the project summary, then description, before clearing it of “DEIA,” or diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, language.
Thomasville’s grant application makes repeated reference to “environmental justice,” a bogeyman under the Trump administration.
“U.S. taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize this town’s ‘trade-in of gas powered lawn care equipment,’ ‘environmental justice offices’ and ‘green building consultants,’” an EPA spokesperson said in an email about the terminated grant.
The Thomasville grant is the biggest of the 33 listed on DOGE’s “Greatest Hits” page. One of the next-largest sought to address yet another health crisis in Georgia: maternal mortality.
The United States’ maternal mortality rate is higher than all other high-income countries, and Georgia has one of the highest pregnancy-related mortality rates in the country, per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Morehouse School of Medicine, in collaboration with Emory University and local organizations, was awarded nearly $1.5 million for research and action with the “goal of ending the maternal behavioral health crisis in Georgia and beyond.” As the Morehouse grant outline points out, Black women are 2.3 times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related issues, and the research sought to address that disparity.
The Trump administration terminated the award in March.
Another listed grant had been awarded to a coalition of universities to fund research into reducing transportation congestion. Prior research by the same coalition has already been put in use to extend the lifespan of infrastructure in New York City, the group says, and prompted a 2021 state law aimed at reducing congestion by ticketing overweight trucks.
A subgoal of the research was to explore traffic solutions that also address “inequities on different population segments,” taking into account “underserved communities.” Equity-related grants are disallowed under Trump’s Day 1 executive order; the term appears nearly a thousand times throughout DOGE’s full accounting of terminated grants.
A $1 million grant to New Haven, Connecticut, sought to electrify aging home cooking infrastructure across half a dozen neighborhoods. Most of those communities have asthma rates between the 94th and 99th percentiles in the nation, documents related to the grant show, and 30% of residents live 200% below the federal poverty line.
The Trump administration terminated the grant in March, and DOGE added it to the “greatest hits” list in June.
But between those events, the city fought back, and its court battle has offered some insight into the administration’s process of carrying out the terminations of multi-million dollar grants across the country.
New Haven joined six other cities and over a dozen nonprofits in suing the Trump administration, arguing the mass freezing of the congressionally mandated funding was illegal.
In court, the Trump administration claimed it had individually reviewed each grant for termination and that they were not halted as part of a blanket — and possibly unconstitutional — freeze of congressionally mandated spending.
U.S. District Judge Richard Mark Gergel demanded evidence to that effect, and later wrote that despite the Trump administration turning over hundreds of pages of documents to the court, “not one document showed any individualized review” of any of the grants.
The government argued that the reviews were simply not documented in writing, according to a declaration filed in court from EPA Assistant Deputy Administrator Travis Voyles.
Voyles wrote that in February, he personally made an “individualized review” of a number of agency grants, including the New Haven grant and others involved in the lawsuit, and concluded they would be “terminated for policy reasons.”
Voyles wrote that he then “orally communicated my decision” to another EPA official, Daniel Coogan, who set the wheels in motion for the grant funds to be frozen ahead of formal termination notices in March.
The judge was skeptical: “The Court finds it hard to believe that numerous active federal grants, some totaling millions of dollars, were summarily terminated by a high-ranking government official without the production of a single document to detail the review and decision making process,” Gergel wrote.
There is also no mention of DOGE’s involvement anywhere in the process, despite it later seeking to take credit for “uncovering” the New Haven grant and others on its list.
The district judge ultimately found that the coalition suing the Trump administration produced “highly persuasive evidence to support their claims” that the cancellations violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. In May, he granted a permanent injunction and ordered the administration to immediately continue funding all of the grants involved in the lawsuit.
But New Haven and the other cities aren’t out of the woods yet. The Trump administration appealed the decision, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit paused the permanent injunction as the appeals process continues.
Federal lawmakers have also sought to reverse some of the grant cancellations in their states, or at least press Trump officials about the cuts.
The Thomasville grant’s termination became a point of contention between Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin during a hearing in May. Zeldin said he didn’t know if he was familiar with the city and deferred to Trump’s “executive orders as it relates to environmental justice, with regards to DEI.”
“Is a new health clinic for Thomasville, Georgia, woke?” Ossoff asked.
“I imagine as we look through the details of the particular program, there must be some aspects of this applying the last administration’s priorities on environmental justice,” Zeldin said.
“Here’s a community that suffered from air pollution, has a high disease burden as a result,” Ossoff said. “Finally, the federal government comes. They’re going to help build a health clinic and upgrade some infrastructure. You canceled the grant, devastating for the community.”
For its part, Thomasville is hoping for the funds to come back.
“We do intend to follow the proper procedures provided to appeal the decision,” Ricky Zambrano, Thomasville’s public information manager, told NOTUS in a statement. “We are hopeful that a positive and swift resolution to this setback can put us back on track to assist the hundreds of citizens that would be positively impacted by the Community Change Grant.”