These last few months have rendered Sulphur Creek unrecognizable.
The quiet stream is a fixture outside Napa—as is the 120-year-old bridge it burbles under, universally recognized as a threat to steelhead trout. Since Bill Birmingham started as a project manager at the Napa Resource Conservation District a decade ago, he and his RCD colleagues have been making plans to reshape the stream for fish.
Now they’re actually doing it, thanks to a pathbreaking wave of federal funding. Grumbling construction equipment has replaced running water. By fall, the old bridge will tumble and a new, fish-friendly bridge will rise. By winter, if the stars—and rains—align, steelhead will be able to fin their merry way upstream at long last.
Sulphur Creek was intended to be part of a movement. Billions of dollars in former President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were meant to be “a freaking game-changer” for conservation and climate work in the Bay Area, according to one expert Bay Nature interviewed when we first began tracking that money in June 2023.
Two years later, the game has indeed changed—but in a new direction. The new paradigm of environment funding and work is marked by fear, not optimism. This legislation has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration since before its January inauguration; early executive actions froze BIL and IRA funding, setting off a rollercoaster of lawsuits, court orders, and many sleepless nights for grantees. The president calls this legislation “the Green New Scam.”
Still, a lot of this money has already been awarded locally—more than $1.4 billion, in fact, according to Bay Nature’s reporting. What kind of difference can it still make—especially as Trump claws back funds and eviscerates federal natural-resource agencies?
We’re following BIL and IRA’s big federal funding for Bay Area nature.
“The whole was intended to be greater than the sum of parts,” says Romany Webb, the deputy director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Carving off small bits of it can actually be quite devastating to the overall results that were intended.”
Over more than a dozen interviews with grantees, federal employees, policy analysts, researchers, and more, Bay Nature has uncovered that there is no neat way to summarize BIL and IRA as a win or a loss. Instead, we found stories careening in many directions: unexpected successes, heartbreaking failures, and tense equilibriums.
According to the data we’ve compiled over the past two years, this funding has supported at least 158 attempts to protect, restore, and grow nature across the greater Bay Area. How each has fared—and will fare—depends, like in any ecosystem, on the web of relationships around it. Conservation organizations told us they are reconsidering whether to bother with federal funding going forward, while finding ways to recommit to their slice of nature.
“We’re not doing the work for the next two years,” says Annie Burke, the executive director of Together Bay Area, a regional coalition of conservation organizations. “We’re doing it for our kids’ futures.”
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What was meant to happen
These laws had a lot on their plate. BIL and IRA were meant to address failing infrastructure, supercharge clean energy, and generally jumpstart America’s response to the climate crisis.
The money they promised for nature was never the largest or most prominent part of the bill, whose enormous tax credits for green energy and greenhouse gas reductions stole most headlines. But in the Bay Area, Bay Nature reported on the widespread excitement over the money to come among environmental advocates focused on restoring coastlines, fighting wildfire, adapting to sea-level rise, getting rid of invasives, planting trees, protecting flowers, seeding Indigenous gardens, and so much more.
Before BIL and IRA, “it was unheard of that the federal government would be investing that much funding,” says Martha Guzman, who was the Biden-appointed administrator of EPA’s Region 9, which includes the Bay Area. She had big hopes because much of this money, in a landmark move for the federal government, was meant for underserved communities long overburdened by pollution and environmental damage. “When the federal government directs resources, it can be transformative,” she says.
For nature-based climate solutions, the legislation started new programs, bulked up others, hired more federal employees, and tackled some long-languishing projects. Bay Nature tracked funding for nature-related projects across 30 different funding programs and a dozen federal bureaus or agencies. We reported on conflicts, as funded restoration projects displaced people from their homes; delays, as wildfire funding took critical months to arrive; and tensions, as agencies struggled to get all the money out the door; but the legislation’s ambition set new agendas for climate work. “It was so exciting,” says Nancy Wahl-Scheurich, the executive director of the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts. “You could really focus on doing work that was going to directly deal with climate change.”
At a December 2024 meeting of the Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System, a NOAA-funded ocean monitoring program, deputy director Alex Harper remembers celebrating the new investments. Finally, CeNCOOS could replace aging equipment, hire new staff, and organize their systems. “We really felt like we had finally caught the tailwinds needed to move the observing system to the next level,” she says. “Things were just feeling secured and hardened in a way that we hadn’t seen before.”
What happened
Trump’s election upended everything that once seemed unshakable about federal funding. His executive orders froze money no one had thought could be frozen. Rollercoasters in court cases and lawsuits locked and unlocked money, whiplashing local grant programs. One grant in Richmond meant to plant trees and restore trails was suspended, reinstated, then suspended again.
Some new federally funded programs shut down as soon as Trump took office: within days, databases to help identify historically underserved communities like the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CJEST) went dark. Independent researchers raced against time to download the data before it disappeared, while acknowledging that without the government’s updates it would inevitably become out-of-date.
Across the board, the Trump administration terminated funding that went towards equity and DEI-focused efforts. In the process, Bay Area projects years in the making have had to change tack. The Port of Oakland, the city of Alameda, the city of Oakland, and East Bay Regional Parks District spent a year and $100,000 to apply for $50 million through the Federal Emergency Management Authority’s (FEMA) Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, a funding program initiated during Trump’s first term that received an additional $1 billion in funding from BIL. The agencies want to reshape the Alameda and Oakland shoreline for the future’s rising seas. “There’s not many other sources of funding on this scale,” says Danielle Mieler, Alameda’s sustainability and resilience manager. In April, FEMA cancelled the BRIC program, describing it as “wasteful” and “politicized,” and the shoreline project pivoted to search for new funding sources.
The Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash the federal government stripped new BIL and IRA programs in subtle ways, even if the programs themselves continued to exist. The mass firing of probationary federal employees disproportionately hit new BIL and IRA programs at NOAA, says Matthew Koller, whose position at the agency was terminated on February 27. He was only a few months into his new job, at a new IRA-funded climate-ready fisheries program meant to help predict how fisheries would change as oceans warmed. “DOGE cut programs at the knees,” he says. “The agency just does not have the capacity to perform that science [anymore].”
Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” cuts billions from conservation programs nationwide, and specifically targets IRA-funded programs. In July, Congress approved it, clawing back unspent funds across old and new IRA-funded programs alike, such as money allocated to help write recovery plans for endangered species or conservation on public lands. BIL funds were largely untouched, though several grants tracked by Bay Nature have closed funding opportunities as agency management reviews the programs.
Guzman worries the budget cuts at agencies, like closing the EPA’s Office of Atmospheric Research, will functionally shutter what survives. “When you take away its limbs … it’s a soft kill on everything,” she says. “Instead of investing money in what people need, we’re wasting money on creating a militarization state.”
Scientist Stu Weiss had once hoped IRA funds for endangered species could downlist his beloved Mission blue butterflies from endangered to threatened. Now, he’s wondering how much longer he can spend his own money to keep the lupines—the Mission blue host plant—in his nursery alive, with little prospect of planting them in the wild. When Bay Nature called him, he was readying to go to a protest in Palo Alto. “It just gets me really pissed off,” he says. “It’s like a wrecking crew.”
The financial impact isn’t yet at the scale Annie Burke, the executive director of Together Bay Area, a regional coalition of conservation organizations, had feared. “The impacts right now are much more psychological,” she says. For months, Bay Nature has heard people describe countless stressful meetings and long workdays preparing backup plans for every federal scenario. Though the Sulphur Creek project hasn’t experienced any interruptions, Birmingham is now submitting invoices every two weeks to NOAA, just in case the funding gets cut off. Normally, he would submit invoices four times a year. It’s hours more spent on tedious paperwork that otherwise Birmingham would devote to the many other restoration projects he manages.
“Through this administration, we’re never going to feel safe,” says Wahl-Scheurich about California’s resource conservation districts and their partners, many of which received unprecedented amounts of federal funding. “All trust has been broken.”
What will happen
Some transformations remain in motion, because some money can’t be unspent. Around 64 percent of federal grants from IRA has been awarded, per tracking by the Climate Program Portal, a project by the think tank Atlas Public Policy, and 68 percent of money for grants from BIL have been obligated or spent, according to an analysis by the U.S. Goverment Accountability Office. Much of the money was meant to be spent within four years, so some programs were cut short by only a year or two. Despite the Trump administration’s attempts to terminate $200 million in funding for the Presidio to overhaul its ancient electricity system—one of the largest single allocations from the bills for Bay Area nature—the renovation remains on timeline, says Jean Fraser, the CEO of the Presidio Trust. CeNCOOS has secured much of its remaining BIL and IRA funding to continue its upgrades.
And even as the federal government attempts to erase the term environmental justice, in underserved communities across the Bay Area, “we’re going to see the benefits from [this funding] for decades,” Guzman says. Nor has federal chaos altered the trajectory of the $18 million Pacific Coast Ocean Restoration Grant, a scientific collaborative aimed at protecting West Coast ecosystems, according to lead scientist Bryan DeAngelis, of The Nature Conservancy. To build on the foundation this three-year federal grant establishes, he expects the group will need to sub in new funding sources. “Given the entire need for ecosystem restoration … we don’t have an option other than to find the solution,” says DeAngelis.
Some people’s outlooks have shifted from abundance to scarcity. “We’re trying to scrounge whatever funds left from those two bills that we can to just not have to lose staff,” says a NOAA staff member who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. Guzman expects much of the environmental justice work will now shift back to the shoulders of residents who have spent decades fighting environmental pollution. “You’re still going to pursue [change],” she says. “It’s going to be slower, inevitably.” Few say they are looking to apply for federal funding in the near future.
Proposition 4, the $10 billion in climate resilience funding that Californians voted for in November 2024, has now emerged as a backstop to federal climate funding, rather than as a supplement. “Without Prop 4, [this] would have been even scarier,” says Wahl-Scheurich. The Alameda and Oakland shoreline restoration project has already begun to apply for Prop. 4 money, while also planning for other grants. None will be as much as the FEMA one—but together, they can add up.
Nonprofit leaders know state funding will be more competitive than ever as federal grant opportunities evaporate. Prop. 4 webinars have crashed as prospective applicants have flooded online calls in the hundreds. Burke hopes it inspires collaboration. “This is one of the richest countries in the world,” she says. “I see it as an opportunity to get creative.”
What that creativity looks like, she doesn’t know yet. The rules of this new world are still emerging. Multiple people working on federally funded projects declined to talk to Bay Nature for this article, worried that publicity could imperil their work.
“We’re going to take a slightly different approach,” says Lucas Patzek, the executive director at the Napa RCD. He’s planning to invite their local congressman out to Sulphur Creek this fall to watch a bulldozer take the first hit at the old bridge.
