Environmental lawyer David Hayes’s career is intertwined with the U.S. government’s biggest environmental legislation. He served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior under President Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama, amid years advising on environment and energy issues. In the Biden administration, he was a Special Assistant to the President for Climate Policy. There, he helped draft and get Congress to pass Biden’s signature climate legislation—the more than $2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (2021) and Inflation Reduction Act (2022). Now, teaching at Stanford University, he examines how the bills are used for biodiversity, especially climate-smart forestry and agriculture.
But big changes may be coming for these bills. Donald Trump campaigned on promises to “rescind all unspent funds” from the Inflation Reduction Act in an effort to “terminate” Biden’s green policy agenda, which he refers to as the “Green New Scam.” The President-elect’s pledges have implications across the country, where this legislation has already delivered billions in tax credits, grants, and more to a variety of climate-related infrastructure and resilience programs. Meanwhile, independent analyses indicate more than $80 billion has yet to arrive.
Turning off the tap could change a lot of work set in motion. Most of the bills’ big money is for climate mitigation, like ramping up a green energy economy. But when Bay Nature began reporting on this money in April 2023, environmental advocates and officials told us it could be transformational for Bay Area landscapes, too. Since then, we have documented nearly $1.4 billion flowing from BIL and IRA to the greater Bay Area for biodiversity, wildfire, coastal resilience, climate-smart agriculture, and nature-based climate solutions. Many grants have focused on environmental justice for historically underserved communities.
So Hayes sees the Trump administration as a “nightmare scenario.” Bay Nature sat down with him for two interviews, before and after the election, to take stock of what BIL and IRA have done for nature so far, and what their present—and future—looks like now.
Bay Nature is reporting on the impacts of BIL and IRA on nature in the greater Bay Area. See all the stories and learn how to submit tips at the Wild Billions project page.
Bay Nature: Trump is beginning to announce his Cabinet picks. He just announced the EPA leader as Lee Zeldin. What do people need to know and look out for in terms of climate and adaptation as the administration takes shape?
Hayes: The President has called climate change a hoax, and that would suggest that he would not be in favor of spending federal resources when it comes to climate. We’ve seen this play before. He was president for four years, and he looked for opportunities to express his views on climate and they are, you know, negative.
On the other hand, there are a number of ongoing programs that focus on climate resilience, at FEMA [the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency], at HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], and other agencies. Certainly, when it comes to responding to climate-infused disasters. I would hope and expect that a President Trump would be responsive to the immediate disaster. It remains to be seen how supportive they will be of mitigation measures taken in anticipation of disasters, which will become more frequent because of climate change.
While you were working on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, what were your dreams for the legislations’ impact?
My dreams were that we would have two very significant laws that would, among many other things, have central relevance to climate both in terms of reducing greenhouse gases and addressing climate impacts. I’m proud of what both laws have done. Like everything in life, I wish that we could have done more.
Four years on, how are we doing on that dream?
On the greenhouse gas reduction front, I think we are doing very well. Some aspects of the potential innovations, and even deployment, have not gone as well as hoped for.
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The reality is that we’re new at this. In the White House, we worked very hard to develop a climate resilience and adaptation strategy, and it was an interagency effort. But we don’t yet have a chief resilience officer in the White House. We don’t yet have the muscle of a fully coordinated federal effort.
I’m quite in tune with some of the innovations and money going into climate-smart agriculture and climate-smart forestry, and I’m working with American Forests on some of the reforestation efforts in California. The funds that the Forest Service is getting [here] are being very well applied to to help organize the entire process of reforestation, which requires a lot of attention on seedling development, on stabilizing fire-scarred landscapes. There’s a big focus on measuring baseline conditions and monitoring future carbon sequestration with replantation. Big, big job—4 million acres in the West—but very significant work in California.
We found that a lot of small organizations and even a few big ones aren’t even aware this money exists for nature, given these were billed as climate mitigation bills. Do you think that BIL and IRA’s billions for nature were adequately communicated?
It’s hard to communicate. Those are enormous bills. They were not conceptualized as a single piece of legislation. The issue of access to resilience dollars is a serious one, and particularly for communities that are disadvantaged. Sophisticated communities that have the money to hire the grant officers, to go out to find the opportunity, and file successful applications for grants, are much better equipped to capture a disproportionate amount of the money.
How do you think different agencies have fared in spending BIL and IRA money?
The reality is that these bills were creatures of Congress and appropriators from different committees with different capabilities and interests. There have been winners and losers. It was a reconciliation legislation, which meant that Congress had to use existing programs for funding. So NOAA had good existing coastal restoration programs, and boom—a lot of new money came in. The Inflation Reduction Act had to be a budget-oriented bill, and could not be a substantive new program bill.
That’s part of the reason for somewhat of the scattershot approach when it came to resilience and adaptation. The last 10 years, we’ve been brutally informed about the fact that climate is having a very significant current impact on many of our resources. We’re scrambling to develop the programs and the funding to meet the challenge.
What are you most worried about [with the new administration]?
I think there’ll be quite a particular focus on the Inflation Reduction Act and programs where funds have not yet been spent that have climate stamped on them, if you will. I think most of the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act will survive because they are popular all over the country, including a lot of the tax credits. But the grant programs are the ones that will be scrutinized, I presume, by the new administration.
What is the work that people need to do in the next [couple of months], especially on federal and state levels, to prepare for the new administration?
The Biden administration has been preparing for this possibility for many months. They have been pushing out an accelerated timetable of grant programs under both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. There’s only so much that can be done over the next 90 days, but they’re prepared to do as much as possible.
This is such a large amount of money to spend in a really short amount of time for projects that generally take multiple decades with a federal system that is famously slow-moving. What are the challenges there in getting the money moving?
The challenge is what you’re focusing on, which is the ability of communities and groups to absorb the money and spend it effectively and so that infrastructure, if you will, has to build up. It’s a real opportunity for NGOs and communities to demonstrate their capability to take public money and spend it wisely, because we’re seeing again with the recent hurricanes and other extreme weather events, these issues are here to stay.
What do you think the role of state governments such as California, which just passed Prop 4, when it comes to interacting with a federal administration potentially more hostile to climate adaptation work over the next four years?
I’m sure there will be an effort made to to focus on the disaster aspect of preparing for climate change. Frankly, it’s annoying, but semantically, not talking about these as “climate change” funding but instead [as] “disaster mitigation” funding, that obviously are connected to climate change, if you get my point.
For places where funding has already been spent, but the programs are in progress, how much damage can be done with the potential personnel impacts, as government departments—as Trump has advocated—are resized, or personnel leave, or funding gets cut for just capacity?
It’s a concern. If grants have been awarded already, it should be difficult to claw them back. I think a lot of the work in the next 90 days by the current administration is going to be to get the money out the door, physically over to the grantees. And I expect that a number of the mitigation programs will continue. I think it’s an open question about whether the federal workforce will be able to continue to administer these programs effectively if their ranks are diminished by the new administration.
What do you see as the changed role of community and local organizations for this work?
The point remains the same. The hope would be that locally interested constituents will want to work with their local congressmen and local congresswomen to enable those funds to continue to flow. Communities have the potential to be very effective forces to moderate what the President’s predilections might be.
If you had to go back and do it all again, what would you do differently?
We were able to reorganize the federal government to pay attention to adaptation and resilience and conservation with 30×30, the America the Beautiful program. It’s a wonderful foundation, but more is needed. Adaptation and resilience is, by definition, a local issue. It’s what’s happening in my community that matters, and what’s happening in the Bay Area is different in terms of how to address it than what’s happening in the Midwest, the plains, the southeast, the Gulf states. So this is an area where the connection between the federal government and states and communities are going to need to mature and develop in a strong way. It can’t be a top-down federal government program. It’s got to be bottom-up, informed collaboration. These early programs are providing a training ground for that.
