This Alaska Native fishing village was trying to power their town. Then came Trump’s funding cuts. todayheadline

For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay. 

John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options.

Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average — the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy. 

“Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”

In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade, because they simply can’t afford to power it. 

Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport. 

The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.” 

In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF — a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United. 

Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle. 

The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.

On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal D.C. district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision. 

Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible. 

Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers — and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources. 

“We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz.

In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.” 

A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment. 

Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes.

The community eventually moved their village about a ten-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including safe harbor for fishing boats.

The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline — the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village, increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea. 

Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis. 

“I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.”

The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty.

In even that short period of whiplash — from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish — the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year — a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with. 

“It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said.

Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.” 

For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”   

Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.” 

Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable. 

Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up — the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said. 

Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization plans to pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program. 

“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele.

While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”