The impact is acute in Kotzebue, a small city in northwest Alaska that sits on a gravel spit jutting into Kotzebue Sound just north of the Arctic Circle. Accessible only by air and sea, the community has a three-month window each year to receive all the diesel fuel it will use for the following year. Diesel supplies 75 percent of the community's power, and residents spend about 20 percent of their income on it—more than three times the average energy burden for low-income households nationwide.

"We're pretty much at the mercy of world markets," Chad Nordlum, energy project manager for the Native Village of Kotzebue, told Grist. "Right now, with the Iran war going on, the diesel prices are very high and we're locked in to much higher prices than we've had in the past. There's really nothing the community can do about diesel prices, but what we can do is produce our own energy."

Nordlum had been excited about a $20 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to support a wind energy project, announced in 2024 as part of a larger $150 million allocation for tribal infrastructure in Alaska. He said the project would have lowered the community's reliance on diesel to about 40 to 50 percent and given the tribe more control over energy and economic decisions. The Trump administration canceled the grant in May 2025, and more than a year later the project remains paused.

Rob Maxim, a Mashpee Wampanoag fellow at Brookings Metro, said climate and environmental funding is especially crucial for Indigenous communities because they are often the most severely impacted by climate change, particularly after years of underinvestment.

"The actions that the Trump administration are taking are particularly significant, but it's not totally out of trend with previous administrations," Maxim said. "And what we wanted to show was that actually this underinvestment is kind of the default for the U.S. rather than a blip."

The true aberration, according to the reports, was the unprecedented level of funding after the pandemic. Under the Biden administration, more than $700 million in climate, energy, and infrastructure funding flowed to tribes, covering projects such as climate action plans and food systems analysis. The Hopi Tribe was slated to receive a $25 million grant to install solar panels for 600 homes; that grant, along with the entire $7 billion Solar for All program, was cut.

Maxim said funding for Indigenous communities is a federal obligation based on treaties and other agreements and should be standard and irrevocable. "The funding that was flowing to Indian Country was not being done on the basis of race or DEI, and it was absolutely not illegal," he said. "It was aimed at the promotion of tribal sovereignty and the well-being of tribal citizens and tribal communities, and so that is, you know, an obligation that the U.S. government maintains."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The EPA, in a statement provided several days after the story originally published Nov. 2, said: "The Trump EPA is committed to ensuring taxpayer dollars are being used appropriately and has reviewed all funding activities with that lens. Through the agency's General Assistance Program (GAP) and other granting programs, EPA has awarded more than $351 million in Tribal grants funding since the beginning of the second Trump administration."

Glencora Haskins, a senior research associate and applied research manager at Brookings Metro, said the administration had targeted funding to tribes, with "tribal" being the most frequently flagged term. "I think that there was a very surface-level view of what a lot of these programs were doing, rather than any deep interrogation of the types of systemic infrastructure deficits that programs were trying to fix," Haskins said.

In Native communities throughout Alaska and around the country, energy and infrastructure needs are especially acute because of increasingly frequent and destructive storms, wildfires, and other climate-driven disasters.

Haskins and Maxim recommend that Congress pass legislation barring the cancellation of grants and contracts for tribes and stipulating that all funding for Indigenous nations and communities serves trust and treaty obligations, even when it comes from a program with a different stated purpose. They also call for a statutory requirement that money flow directly to tribes rather than having them seek reimbursement from the U.S. Treasury.

In Kotzebue, Nordlum hopes the political tide will turn enough to get the wind project funding moving. In the meantime, he is working on a smaller solar project he hopes will help alleviate the community's energy challenges.

"Our main goals are energy security and economic development for the tribe, which is ultimately being able to invest in our own community, help make the lives of people here a little more sustainable," Nordlum said. "We want our community to continue on into the future. We have to get a handle on our energy prices and availability."