Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a radical left-wing activist group, is closing down a grantmaking program that the Biden administration sought to seed with $50 million in taxpayer cash, the Daily Caller News Foundation has confirmed.
CJA is sunsetting the “environmental justice”-focused grant program that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sought to fund with $50 million from one of the agency’s massive “environmental justice” grant programs, a spokesperson representing the group confirmed to the DCNF. The funds that the Biden EPA looked to route to CJA did not make it out the door before President Donald Trump and his team took power in Washington in January, and the Trump EPA is not at all keen to allow those dollars to get to CJA and other left-wing activist organizations that emerged as major beneficiaries of Biden EPA spending programs.
In December 2023, the Biden EPA selected CJA as one of the winners of its “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking program,” a $600 million initiative to dole out large checks to activist groups and universities, which in turn would disseminate the funds to local subgrantees. CJA notified its members of the news on Wednesday, and the organization is also expected to announce that it is sunsetting its grantmaking program in a post to its website sometime Wednesday afternoon, the spokesperson representing CJA told the DCNF.
“Climate Justice Alliance is sunsetting the UNITE-EJ program due to a lack of federal funding,” K.D. Chavez, executive director for CJA, wrote in an email to the DCNF. “Refusing federal dollars to CJA harms future generations and strips power from everyday people and their ability to access clean air and water.”
Chavez added that projects that would have been funded include monitoring air quality, water quality and effluent discharges from industrial facilities.
“It would be welcome news to U.S. taxpayers that their hard earned dollars are not going to Climate Justice Alliance, who has openly expressed radical, anti-American, and anti-Semitic views,” Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said in a statement shared with the DCNF. “I have long warned about the waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the Biden EPA’s grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and I’m pleased that in this case, it appears the funding will not be awarded.”
CJA describes itself as “building a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression” and believes that “the path to climate justice travels through a free Palestine.” The organization offers several printable posters, ostensibly for use in protest demonstrations, on its website that advocate for causes like defunding the police and abolishing prisons, among other radical positions.
The group has also spread false narratives about the January 2023 death of a gender non-binary activist near Atlanta, Georgia. Manuel Terán, known more widely by the nickname “Tortuguita,” allegedly fired upon law enforcement officers near the site of the “Cop City” training center in January; the officers returned fire, killing Tortuguita in the process, according to The New York Times. In March 2023, Climate Justice Alliance misleadingly asserted that Tortuguita was a victim of a “political assassination” carried out by the police, though prosecutors opted against charging the involved officers because they believe Tortuguita posed a threat at the time of his death.
CJA was not the only hardline left-wing activist group to be picked as a big winner of the Biden EPA’s profligate spending. Awardees of “environmental justice” initiatives and other Biden EPA programs also included left-wing activist groups that oppose capitalism, sponsor other groups pushing for decarceration and seek to push so-called “diversity, equity and inclusion” in classrooms.
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