This is an unofficial copy of EPA data, hosted by the Public Environmental Data Partners. Some links and text may incorrectly suggest
that this site is affiliated with the US Government.
Methodology
- We acquired a list of EPA grants made under IRA here and filtered them to environmental justice (EJ) programs. This resulted in ~315 grants.
- We then joined this with a list of grants EPA made available to the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) committee regarding which grants it intends to cancel The EPW list contains additional information about the financial status of each grant, including amount of funding remaining.
- After joining the two, we arrived at a full list of 510 grants. We "geocoded" the additional ~200 grants from the EPW list, meaning we searched for the street address of each grant recipient organization and then translated addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates. This automated process initially produced some errors, which we attempted to correct manually. It is important to note that each point on the map represents a "place of performance" where a grant recipient organization is headquartered, which is not necessarily the community where the funding would be spent (see below).
- From here, we removed grants with $0 remaining to be allocated, except for 2 grants with $0 but with award dates post-inauguration, in February 2025
- We also removed grants described as "financially closed" and with award dates prior to the start of the second Trump administration.
- This left us with 398 grants, 82 of which originated from the list released to EPW
- While the initial list of ~315 grants included project descriptions, those from the EPW list did not. We used the usaspending.gov API to look up project descriptions for these. In the process of doing so, we corrected 3 grant IDs that had been improperly digitized from the screenshots EPA shared with EPW.
Data description
Records of grants made under the Inflation Reduction Act are described in their original source as follows:
These data depict the primary place of performance only for select EPA projects and highlights a
subset of all investments made under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction
Act. Both primary and sub-award information is included; however, funding amounts are not displayed
for sub-awards / projects. Locations indicated here are determined using a variety of methods and may
not correspond precisely to an exact, physical location. This map is not comprehensive and will be
updated periodically as additional information becomes available including sub-award grant data.
Data Caveats
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The points on the map are an approximation of the place of performance and do not represent the full
extent of where, e.g., clean school buses will be operating and where emissions benefits from these
projects will accrue. In fact, in accordance with OMB reporting requirements, grants which are
associated with multiple places of performance are represented in this map by the primary place of
performance as indicated by the EPA grant project officer.
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This data visualization does not include information about regularly appropriated EPA program
dollars, only EPA Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding.
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In the case of EPA’s Office of Air & Radiation grants, it is important to note cases where the dot
on the map is just an approximation: (a) Where one grant is funding the purchase of multiple
vehicles, operating in multiple locations, the one dot must represent dozens of actual places of
performance. For example, under the Clean School Bus program, if a third-party applicant includes 10
school districts, each funding 2 buses, the dot associated with that participant may actually
represent ten distinct places of performance. (b) Similarly, for the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act
(DERA), a single grant, represented by a single dot on the map could fund one crane at an airport
and five heavy-duty buses, each operating in multiple counties. (c) Additionally, the dot on the
map sometimes represents the address of the grantee instead of the place of performance or where the
vehicles will be operating.
Data Source Information
Apart from a few programs, these data are updated daily in accordance with new award information entered
into EPA's NextGen Grants Systems (NGGS). Superfund, Clean School Bus, and a few other programs have
their data sourced directly from the programs on a less than daily basis.
With regards to point feature placement on the map, the NGGS system offers a robust interface
allowing the project officer to map the place of performance by political boundary or natural feature
(such as watershed). If a grant is having benefit over multiple places of performance, a project
officer must choose a primary one and for that one the centroid is used to place the point on the map.
In some cases, this centroid is a fair approximation of the place of benefit but in other cases, such
as with grants addressing air quality, it can largely under-represent the actual benefited areas.