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President Donald Trump has placed holds on tens of billions of dollars in congressionally approved spending for projects across the U.S. that range from Iowa soybean farmers adopting greener practices to a Virginia railway expansion, a Reuters analysis found. Project managers and advocates warn that continued delays could take a toll on local economies. Democratic lawmakers say the halts are the building blocks to “impoundment,” presidential refusal to release money authorized and appropriated by Congress, which they say is illegal. The man Trump has nominated as his budget chief, Russell Vought, has disagreed, saying presidents have the right to withhold spending. The Republican-majority Senate is expected to confirm Vought on Thursday evening after Democrats staged an all-night session in opposition. A federal court on January 31 temporarily blocked the Trump administrations government-wide pause on federal grant funding. But soon after, the administration argued the presidents directives were still in effect. Trump’s orders have restrained at least tens of billions of dollars of funding for clean energy projects, conservation initiatives and transportation projects across the country. Dozens of interviews with grantees in more than 20 states, along with industry managers and experts that track how the federal government distributes its money, captured just a snapshot of federal spending that Trump’s orders continued to freeze. The Trump administration has not provided an overall estimate of the frozen funding, but thousands of new jobs in communities are at risk, people working on the halted projects said. “It’s a major concern if this doesn’t get done,” Mike Foley, a Cuyahoga County, Ohio, official who oversees energy projects with more than $100 million in paused funding, said. “I need to hire engineers and I cant do that.” The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power over federal spending and a decades-old law requires the president to give Congress advance notice of impoundments before taking action. “We will speak out, we will press this administration, we will open investigations, and we will demand accountability,” Senator Patty Murray, the senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Republican lawmakers argue the pauses are necessary to give the new administration time to assess what money is being spent on and look for ways to lower the U.S. deficit. “The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating and to ensure that not only the intent of Congress in funding mechanisms, but also the stewardship of precious American taxpayer dollars, is being handled well,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday. The initial January 20 White House orders were broad and told federal agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” from two large bills that were marquee accomplishments of then-President Joe Biden, including a 2021 bipartisan effort. Disrupted funding The town of Painesville, Ohio, about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Cleveland, received part of a $129 million climate pollution reduction grant last year to replace its 137-year-old coal-fired power plant. It would be replaced with solar panels and a battery backup system, but the project and its estimated 200 jobs remains on hiatus because of the funding pause. To have the grants paused or frozen is really disrupting and disheartening, Foley, the project lead, added. Hundreds of millions of dollars also remain paused throughout Ohio and seven other states ranging from Pennsylvania to Kansas for projects to help around 17,000 lower-income households save on energy costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday indicated to some grantees, in a list viewed by Reuters, that only one educational program out of dozens of varying projects funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that Republicans opposed would likely move forward. Tom Taylor, senior policy analyst at Atlas Public Policy, a climate think-tank, estimated that thousands of grant recipients could be defunded as a result. In Virginia, a $2.3 billion “Long Bridge” improvement that would significantly increase passenger and freight railroad service is also in limbo, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said. “They seem to be if it happened during the Biden administration we want to pause this, even if its doing good in red and blue states, he told reporters. Republican states Of the approximately $21 billion of funding that could be clawed back by the Department of Transportation, almost $7 billion is directed for projects in states that voted for Trump in 2024, said Corrigan Solerno, the policy manager for the research group Transportation for America. Trump rescinded the previous administrations goal of 40% funding to disadvantaged communities, which includes the climate smart commodities grants for thousands farmers to implement conservation practices like cover crops. This suspension puts the program and its participating farmers at risk, Brent Swart, the president of the Iowa Soybean Association wrote in a Monday letter to all Republican members of Congress from Iowa, saying farmers involved in this regional project are contractually owed $11 million for practices implemented in 2024. Meanwhile, businesses and local officials find themselves hoping for the best as budget battles rage. “I try not to get too anxious about things until I know it’s real,” Danville City Manager Ken Larking said of any potential cuts to a $1.3 billion industrial development park just outside of his Virginia town. Bo Erickson and Richard Cowan, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
The Harvard Law School Library says it is releasing an archive of more than 300,000 government data sets, aiming to protect vital public information at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is wiping it from the web. The initiative, announced Thursday by the Law School Library’s Innovation Lab, is one of several efforts to rescue official figures and government datasets as Trump and his billionaire allies take a wrecking ball to the federal government, yanking thousands of websites offline and in some cases deleting entire agencies off the internet. Academics and researchers from fields including public health, climate studies and sociology have been left scrambling as the Trump administration scrubs official data. On Sunday, the New York Times reported it found that more than 8,000 government web pages had been removed in the aftermath of the presidential transition. The Innovation Lab said in a statement it had so far managed to preserve 311,000 datasets copied between 2024 and 2025, amounting to 16 terabytes of data. Amanda Watson, the Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for library and information services, said her institution’s rescue effort was about “upholding our fundamental belief that government information belongs to the public.” The Innovation Lab isn’t doing the work alone. Others that have scrambled to preserve government data include the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, which has been taking systematic end-of-presidential-term snapshots of government websites since 2008, as well as groups such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which rescued an interactive government widget for checking how polluted a given area was one of many tools knocked offline by the Trump administration. Jack Cushman, who directs the Innovation Lab, said the government collected an untold amount of data. “That’s everything from ‘What is the weather or climate going to be?’ to ‘How are the crops growing?’ to ‘How much water is in aquifers’ to ‘What are people dying of?’ to ‘What jobs are growing or shrinking,'” he said. “The government tracks so many things that help us understand and plan and make sense of what’s happening in the world. We wanted to make sure our patrons can get access to all that information.” Raphael Satter, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Thursday that Texas will be the “flagship” data center site in the Stargate project it is building with SoftBank. Around 16 states have indicated interest in building data centers for Stargate, an OpenAI executive said on a conference call. Stargate plans to invest up to $500 billion to help the United States stay ahead of China and other competitors in the global AI race. In January, President Donald Trump announced the private sector investment initiative to fund AI infrastructure, aiming to outpace rival nations in this critical business technology. Stargate will build data centers and create more than 100,000 jobs in the United States, Trump said. These companies, along with other equity backers of Stargate, have committed $100 billion for immediate deployment, with the remaining investment expected to occur over the next four years. The initial data centers for the project are already under construction in Texas, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison had said then. Juby Babu, Akash Sriram, and Anna Tong, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
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