“We’re having to fight to defend the things that we already fought and won instead of moving to what the next steps are,” said Dariella Rodriguez. “It feels like a real halt on progress.”
Rodriguez is the director of community development at The Point, a South Bronx based arts and environmental community not-for-profit. The Point, which was established in 1994, offers programs ranging from artist talks and exhibitions to youth organizing.
Now, The Point is having to reassess their programs for 2026 and beyond.
The cuts “definitely puts the most vulnerable folks in an even more vulnerable position,” Rodriguez said.
The Point is not alone. Other Bronx nonprofits are also bracing for the worst. The Bronx River Alliance, another community and environmental justice organization, had been awarded two grants to monitor water quality. Work had already begun on the grants, which were awarded through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act totaling $1.5 million. But in March this year, the Trump administration terminated the grant program.
The Bronx River Alliance is fighting the termination in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. But the legal fight is taking a toll. “The time spent trying to fight the terminations in the courts has been a drain to organizational resources,” said Victoria Toro, the outreach manager at the Bronx River Alliance.And so is the time spent writing new grants to replace the ones lost.
“It’s just been a real slash and burn,” said Mychal Johnson, co-founder of South Bronx Unite, whose grant to the EPA was apparently dead-on-arrival with the new administration. “We’re at a really big tipping point, especially with there being so many years left in this administration. The oceans are warming. The storms are greater. And income inequality is probably at its highest point after the New Deal.”
Many not-for-profits, like The Point and the Bronx River Alliance, operate on slim margins already. Without government assistance, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis, the current 4 percent surplus would become a 29 percent deficit. Meaning these organizations will have to radically restructure and cut programs and staff.
One in three “public charities reported experiencing at least one type of government funding disruption in early 2025, including cuts, freezes, or stop work orders,” according to Laura Tomasko, senior policy program manager and lead author of the Urban Institute study.
“Our research also shows that even nonprofits that did not directly experience government funding disruptions reported changes in the entire fundraising landscape, which affects their funding prospects,” she said.
Bronx non-profits “are right to worry,” according to Chris Sellers, professor of history and environmental politics at Stony Brook University.
“We’re not going to see funds coming from Zeldin’s EPA either for climate resiliency or for environmental problems of communities like many in the South Bronx. Perversely, the whole anti-DEI resolve at this agency has been twisted into an aggressive purge of any mention of environmental injustice,” Sellers said.
“For some of the thorniest environmental problems, like climate change and environmental justice, the Zeldin ‘solution’ is simply to declare they aren’t problems at all, just symptoms of ‘wokeness,’ while systematically trying to erase the science and data that demonstrate their reality,” Sellers said.
The EPA budget is set to be further cut by $6.4 billion in the coming 2026 financial year – a cut representing 54 percent from the previous year, according to the Environment Protection Network. “The damage already imposed is going to take years to repair, and if the shutdown brings more firings, perhaps decades,” Sellers said.
The EPA and other federal agencies have historically played a role in enabling environmental and community groups across the country. “But this administration, following Project 2025’s hostility toward community-based NGOs, seems resolved to corrode if not put an end to that role. Given the rollbacks underway into pollution controls and also agency understaffing and dysfunction, we will likely see slowdowns in environmental remediation and far-reaching lapses in the enforcement of environmental laws,” Sellers said.
For organizations like the Bronx River Alliance, the consequences will go beyond financial damages.
“Without the resources the grant was to provide, trust and relationships among residents, partners in the community, organizations, and government at all levels will erode, leading to disengagement and cynicism,” Toro said.
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