The Tebughna Foundation threw a big celebration in February after the Environmental Protection Agency awarded the nonprofit $20 million to renovate or replace 20 homes contaminated with asbestos and lead for the Native Village of Tyonek in Alaska. The project, which would also connect the homes to solar panels, aimed to upgrade houses built in the 1960s.
" We were all just so happy about this grant that’s going to literally change some people’s lives," says Vide Kroto, the foundation’s executive director.
But within a matter of weeks, the Trump administration froze the funding. When Kroto logged onto the federal payment system on March 7, the status of her grant said “suspended.”
She wasn’t alone.
More than 22 tribes and nonprofits across the country from Alaska to the Midwest, have had around $350 million in federal funding for key infrastructure projects frozen, often without notice. NPR spoke with 11 of them who say some have found out their funds were suspended when they logged onto the federal payment system in early March. Others have had their grants disappear from that system entirely. Tyonek and other villages in Alaska received no notice whatsoever.