On February 13 in a quiet auditorium in Oakland, the California State Coastal Conservancy’s executive officer, Amy Hutzel, took the podium at the agency’s board meeting to propose a resolution that, three weeks earlier, would have been “self-evident”: She asked the board to reaffirm the Conservancy’s commitment to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. “These don’t seem to be normal times,” she said.
As the chair moved the resolution to approval, the room of around thirty people, many of them agency staffers, burst into applause.
Commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives swept the predominantly white conservation world in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder. Now, President Donald Trump’s new administration has declared war on them, in a fast, furious, overwhelming, and legally dubious series of orders: shutting down DEI and environmental justice (EJ) programs, placing EJ staffers on administrative leave, reviewing more than 2,600 grant programs for DEI-related language and canceling contracts. The onslaught has provoked a slew of lawsuits, and a letter from 16 state attorneys general reminding organizations that DEI programs are legal, even as companies from Target to the Public Broadcasting Service roll them back.
Now, agencies and nonprofits whose environmental work is funded by federal grants face a quandary: Do they risk their funding to stand up for their values? Or do they scrub the offending statements from their public platforms—since words are, well, just words?
In this series, we’re reporting on how Trump’s agenda affects federal funding for nature locally. Send tips to wildbillions@baynature.org or to Tanvi Dutta Gupta on Signal at colugo_68.21, and read more stories in the project here.
“Every organization has a different risk tolerance,” says Aparna Rajagopal, cofounder of the Avarna Group, which consults with environmental and sustainability-focused organizations to make their work more inclusive. Avarna saw its own federal contracts advising NOAA on how to integrate equity and environmental justice into its programs “grind to a halt” with stop-work orders within Trump’s first two days, Rajagopal says.
Since Trump’s election, Avarna had been advising its nonprofit clients on how to navigate DEI work under a hostile federal administration—“but we did not anticipate the sheer number of [executive orders] that were directed at our work in government [and] the attempt to reach outside of government,” she says. Annie Burke, director of TOGETHER Bay Area, a coalition of local conservation groups, summed up the reactions she’s heard: “There’s a lot of consternation, there’s a lot of stress, there’s a lot of heartbreak,” she says. Rajagopal has fielded dozens of calls from clients—including many Bay Area-based environmental nonprofits—concerned about what those orders mean for them.
Open questions include: Could a public DEI statement imperil a nonprofit’s current or future federal funding? How do organizations respond to administration actions that are working their way through the courts? And how do organizations explicitly focused on environmental justice navigate federal orders that deem environmental justice “illegal”?
The stakes are high: Biden-era climate legislation funneled more than a billion dollars for nature into nonprofits and agencies in the Bay Area and beyond. Many of these grants are still in progress; many of the programs that fund them have been explicitly targeted for review for DEI language under Trump’s executive orders. Federal funding has been a bedrock for some Bay Area-focused environmental organizations’ work, and its availability ramped up with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and Biden-era federal budgets. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco Bay Water Quality Improvement Fund was dramatically expanded in recent years, and has given out more than over $128 million in 91 grants since 2008, according to the EPA.
For some organizations reliant on federal funds, these executive orders could put their livelihoods at risk, Burke says, forcing them to choose between their DEI commitments and their organization’s financial health. Yet organizations untethered by federal funding “are in a very good position to double down on this work,” says Rajagopal.
Some federally funded major environmental organizations working in the Bay Area have publicly reaffirmed their values. Conservation “requires a rich blend of perspectives, ideas and viewpoints that only a truly diverse workforce can provide,” avers a webpage for The Nature Conservancy, which, along with its partners, received more than half a billion dollars in 2023 from Biden-era climate legislation.
As of this week, one Bay Area nonprofit with significant federal funding did the opposite, replacing its web page on DEIJ with an “under construction” notice. “We spent a week working with staff determining how to respond,” says an employee, who requested anonymity to avoid federal reprisal. “Bay Area leaders won’t change their commitment to diversity and environmental justice just because the president says so. They may modify some public language to not be an easy target for his budget cuts.”
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Many are still figuring out the best path forward; most are unclear on how legally enforceable the executive orders will be. “We’ve just been doing a lot of internal conversations, but so far, we haven’t changed anything,” says Melissa Pitkin, the CEO of Point Blue Conservation Science, a conservation research nonprofit based in Petaluma. “We’re still in process with it.” Seventeen percent of Point Blue’s revenue for this fiscal year comes from federal grants, across 14 different agencies.
California Trout’s DEI page now contains a letter to the community saying the organization is revisiting its statement, and notes that this was “not influenced by recent current federal actions on DEI”; the statement was removed in September 2024. Caitlin Sweeney, the director of San Francisco Estuary Partnership, a public-private coalition that is part of the EPA’s National Estuary Program, wrote in an email that the organization has not removed its public “Commitment to Equity” page as it has not received any specific instruction to do so. The DEI webpage of the California Academy of Sciences—which has a dozen employees supported by federal funding, and has more than $3.2 million at risk now across 18 frozen federal grants—remains online.
Sejal Choksi-Chugh, the executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper, worries that moves towards taking down public statements might erase the progress that’s been made since 2020 to integrate equity into environmental conversations. “We haven’t gotten to that tipping point where it was kind of the norm to support DEI efforts,” she says. “Now we’re going to have to take two steps back, and then one step forward again.”
Hutzel says she hopes the Conservancy’s reaffirmation can serve as a “path-setter” for fellow agencies and organizations. “Hopefully it’s not a slow erosion over time to make your language more palatable for federal grants,” she says. “These values are more important than the risk of losing grants.” The state agency currently has almost $67 million under contract with the federal government across 41 grants.
Rajagopal and others have been saying DEI’s framework needed a reset anyway: actions are more important than words. “Really, the work is not in your statement or the acronym you use … ultimately, it should all be integrated into your strategy,” she says. Across conversations with more than 30 organizations, “nobody is backing down from doing this work,” she says.
Burke, at TOGETHER Bay Area, concurs. “We’re being an oak tree. Our roots are deep and strong, and we are standing tall, and we sometimes need to bend and sway with the winds, but that doesn’t knock us over,” she says. “We just continue to do the work we are here to do.”
Update, Feb. 27: A misspelling of Aparna Rajagopal’s name was corrected in the text. A caption misnaming Quercus agrifolia as the coastal live oak was corrected; the correct common name is coast live oak. And an earlier version of the article misstated how much federal funding The Nature Conservancy has received directly.
Update, Feb. 28: Bay Nature corrected which agencies’ contracts with the Avarna Group were stopped, deleting a reference to the U.S. Forest Service. Details on the California Academy of Science’s federal funding were updated with additional information from the Academy.
