Why a tree-planting nonprofit in Chicago is suing the Trump administration

Yahoo

20-03-2025

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
Reverend Brian Sauder had good news in January for 58 faith-based organizations across the Midwest. His Chicago environmental nonprofit, Faith in Place. would be giving each of them a grant to fund tree planting in low-income communities and create urban forestry jobs to maintain them. Those additional trees would help mitigate the effects of climate change and air pollution.
But the good news didn't last long.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed his 'Unleashing American Energy' executive order, which abruptly froze the distribution of funds from the Biden administration's sweeping climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. The move has left critical initiatives in limbo, including urban and community forestry programs like Sauder's Faith in Place.
'To have to call up those grant awardees and say to them: 'Hey, you need to stop work on this. We can't reimburse you. There's a lot of uncertainty right now.' [It] was absolutely devastating,' said Sauder, whose organization has already had to lay off five employees as a result of the federal freeze.
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The Inflation Reduction Act had pledged $1.5 billion to plant more trees in cities and ensure their survival, too. The funding, roughly 40 times what the federal government typically had spent on urban forestry, promised to transform the urban environment across the country. Nonprofits and local governments staffed up to administer the historic level of funding and made big promises to low-income and minority communities to help 'green' their neighborhoods. Now, organizations like Faith in Place, still unable to access federal funds, are facing the financial fallout.
'We're a microcosm of what's happening all across the country with these uncertainties and the government not keeping its commitment to these contracts,' Sauder said.
In response, Faith in Place has signed onto a lawsuit spearheaded by Earthjustice, a nonprofit that litigates national environmental issues. The suit seeks to compel the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which distributes the funds, to honor its financial commitments.
'The President cannot come in and say: 'We're not doing that, we're not following the law that Congress legislated.' That's a violation of separation of powers,' said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.
The legal challenge comes as federal judges have ordered the government to release the Inflation Reduction Act funds already appropriated by Congress, but the USDA has yet to do so. To date, the freeze has stalled hundreds of urban forestry projects nationwide, including one to improve Portland's shrinking tree canopy, an initiative to restore the more than 200,000 trees lost in New Orleans in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina and plans to redress the longstanding disparity in tree coverage across Chicago's majority Black and Latino communities on the city's South and West sides.
In a statement the USDA said it was in the process of reviewing all grants and while it had authorized certain 'mission critical' services to resume, it could not provide information on individual grants.
A 20 minute drive west of the city's downtown sits the historic Stone Temple Baptist Churchi, once a local touchpoint of the civil rights movement, hosting rallies and speakers like Reverend. Martin Luther King Jr.. Federal money was supposed to cover the cost of planting fruit trees in its community garden, providing the majority Black community with seasonal access to pears, peaches, apples and plums.
'The goal was to get the trees in the ground this spring,' Sauder said. But that's not happening amidst the funding uncertainty.
As cities like Chicago grapple with rising global temperatures, improving the urban canopy — the layer of collective tree cover in a city — isn't just about beautifying the neighborhood. Trees help reduce air pollution and are increasingly among the most cost effective ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change, according to Vivek Shandas, who researches climate change at Portland State University and is a member of the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council.
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'Trees are there very quietly, providing essential ecosystem services,' Shandas said. 'Every single day, they're cleaning the air, they're cooling the neighborhoods, they're absorbing the rainwater, and they're doing all of these things for absolutely free.'
The problem: Chicago's urban tree canopy is unevenly distributed across the city — often favoring whiter, weather neighborhoods — and it's also shrinking due to disease and urban development. The city's canopy cover dropped from 19 percent to 16 percent between 2010 and 2020, according to a report from The Morton Arboretum, a public garden and center for tree research in suburban Chicago.
The funding freeze has also halted plans to plant trees statewide.
The Trump administration paused nearly $14 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding promised to the state of Illinois for projects that included hazard tree removal and pruning, tree plantings, tree inventories, and other work related to tree canopy management in Illinois communities.
'It's really upsetting that the government's not keeping their end of the bargain,' Sauder said. 'We've kept our commitment, and they aren't keeping their commitment to us.'
Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist's editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why a tree-planting nonprofit in Chicago is suing the Trump administration on Mar 20, 2025.