With the brief window for fiddlehead foraging nearing its close, citizens of the Mi’kmaq Nation hope to collect the traditional food source this week from the Aroostook River flood plain to test as part of their research into understanding, and in turn reducing, “forever chemicals” in the food supply.
However, they may no longer be able to afford to do the testing they’d planned.
Following months of preparation after securing federal funding in September, the team received an email from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Mission Support on May 13 stating that their four-year grant had been terminated, effective immediately.
“The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities,” the email read.
The EPA terminated all of the 10 grants it had awarded for research into reducing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS, in plants and animals, including two others to Maine-based teams led by the Passamaquoddy Tribe and the University of Maine. PFAS have been linked to long-term adverse health outcomes, such as cancers and weakened immune systems, and their pervasiveness in agriculture is not fully understood.
The termination of these grants, each for roughly $1.6 million, are some of the latest examples of the billions of federal dollars the Trump administration has blocked despite already being appropriated by Congress.
“It’s complete overreach,” said Chelli Stanley, co-founder of an organization committed to cleaning contaminated land, Upland Grassroots, which is part of the research team headed by the Mi’kmaq Nation. “We’re going to appeal. We’re also seeking legal aid.”
The Passamaquoddy Tribe also plans to appeal the termination of its grant, said Marvin Cling, environmental director for the Sipayik Environmental Department at Pleasant Point. UMaine did not provide comment regarding whether they intend to dispute the decision by the time of publication.
The grantees have 30 days from their termination notices to make the case that their work is in compliance with the EPA’s priorities. But crafting that argument is complicated by the fact that the EPA has given contradictory statements regarding why the grants were terminated and whether they are in line with the agency’s priorities.
Conflicting agency response
In a statement provided to Maine Morning Star in response to a request as to why the research no longer aligns with priorities, the EPA equated the grants with diversity, equity and inclusion measures.
“As with any change in administration, the EPA has been reviewing all of its grant programs and awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with administration priorities,” the EPA Press Office wrote. “Maybe the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t have forced their radical agenda of wasteful DEI programs and ‘environmental justice’ preferencing on the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment treating tribes and Alaska Natives as such.”
There is no mention of DEI or environmental justice in the Maine teams’ research plans or overall objectives of the grant program.
“This is a matter of public health,” said Frey Corey, information technology director for the Mi’kmaq Nation who is a researcher for the Tribes’ grant. Corey has worked with the EPA since 1996 when he started managing natural resources for the Tribe.
“There’s been funding challenges over the years — there’s no doubt about that,” Corey said. “But in terms of how they’re operating, this is really unusual.”
Democratic U.S. Rep Chellie Pingree of Maine, who helped secure that funding as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, told Maine Morning Star this response from the EPA was “not only incredibly disappointing, it’s absurd.”
“To suggest that supporting tribal health and environmental safety — in this case, by studying PFAS contamination in their ancestral waters — is some kind of ‘radical agenda’ is both offensive and deeply ignorant,” Pingree said. “How many times do we have to make clear to this administration that tribes are not ‘DEI’?”
The response the EPA provided to Maine Morning Star runs counter to the agency’s press releases in recent weeks, which highlight a focus on combating PFAS contamination, including through partnerships with tribes. It is also directly at odds with the response EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gave to Pingree about the grant terminations during an Appropriations subcommittee hearing last Thursday.
After Zeldin outlined that addressing PFAS contamination is a priority for the agency and him personally, Pingree asked, “Since these grants are consistent with the EPA priorities, do you know why they were terminated?”
Zeldin responded, “It’s an important program. It’s something that’s congressionally appropriated. The agency’s going through a reorg, so the way that the program and these grants are administered are going to be different going forward.”
In early May, the agency announced a significant reorganization with major cuts to staffing, especially to its Office of Research and Development, the part of the agency that provides scientific analysis on environmental hazards. Pingree has called those changes a blatant abuse of public health and the agency’s core mission.
Pingree told Maine Morning Star that she felt Zeldin’s response was a nonanswer.
“The only good thing was he did emphasize that he understood it was appropriated funds,” Pingree said.
But in light of the EPA’s response to Maine Morning Star, Pingree added, “Either Administrator Zeldin was disingenuous with me and our subcommittee, or he and his agency aren’t on the same page.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, also told Maine Morning Star she reached out to the agency earlier this month about the grant terminations and is continuing to press leadership to get a clear answer about their status.
“Research into PFAS mitigation is critically important for our farmers and rural communities, work I am urging the EPA to continue without delay,” Collins said in a statement. “Terminating PFAS grants would be an extremely damaging development.”
Pingree considers the termination to be illegal and unconstitutional.
She is encouraging the grantees to go through the appeals process and also said she will continue to question EPA leadership on the terminations, including during hearings for the proposed budget, which outlines a 55 percent funding cut to the EPA that would directly impact the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
Maine has spearheaded efforts to address PFAS contamination. It was the first state to require manufacturers to report intentionally added PFAS in their products and has established a host of assistance programs to help farms continue to operate while also protecting public health.
“It’s just doubly cruel of the EPA to take that money back from Maine when we’ve been such a leader in dealing with this critical toxin in our environment that we have so much more work to do on,” Pingree said.
The research
The research these grants were supporting in Maine showed promise for helping farmers, communities and consumers detect and prevent PFAS from accumulating in their food, water and soil. It also represents a new model that centers Indigenous communities who have deep knowledge of the land on which this work is being conducted.
The collaboration between the Mi’kmaq Nation, University of Virginia, Upland Grassroots and Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station dates back to 2019, when they came together to test ways to clean toxins from the former Loring Airforce Base in Aroostook County, which now belongs to the Mi’kmaq Nation.
The team has seen early success with using hemp plants to remove PFAS from soil — a process called phytoremediation. These are the findings that led the group to apply for the EPA grant to further study how this method and others can help reduce contamination from irrigation on farms, a well-known reality for Aroostook County.
After receiving the grant in September, the team began the initial phase of the research, which has three overarching focuses.
Randy Martin, executive director of the Central Aroostook County Soil and Water Conservation District, planned to study how irrigation from the Aroostook River causes PFAS build up in soil and then ultimately in crops. Martin started this winter monitoring contamination levels, watering plants using the Aroostook River and harvesting them for testing.
The Mi’kmaq Nation is focused on how widespread PFAS contamination is in the ecosystem, including medicinal and culturally relevant plants, such as fiddleheads as well as ash wood, which the Tribe has long used for basketweaving.
With the grant now in limbo, the team is planning to freeze these samples with the hope that they can still be studied in the future, as testing makes up the bulk of the cost.
Researchers at the University of Virginia created biosensors to detect PFAS, a twist on the idea of sentinel plants, which are alternative species that display visible symptoms of infection to provide warning signs. Bryan Berger, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Virginia, said the grant was going to help expand testing to the field.
“Our work is directly focused on delivering solutions to farmers and communities affected, which we did and continue to do now,” Berger said. “It also provides crucial data for regulatory decisions, and offers industries a cost-effective compliance tool — ultimately safeguarding public health while reducing environmental remediation costs across all sectors.”
Before the EPA terminated the grant, the team published a paper demonstrating how one application of this technology could be used in monitoring environmental water quality and a report for growers that shows how PFAS accumulates in potatoes grown in northern Maine.
“We’re proud of how much we accomplished in a short time, and frustrated we weren’t given the chance to complete our work,” Berger said.
Berger, Stanley and Corey said the team is committed to continuing its research despite the grant termination. If it is not eventually reinstated, they plan to explore private funds.
The other two Maine-based projects had similar but distinct aims.
UMaine’s project was to examine ways to disrupt the PFAS contamination cycle, including by limiting the chemical uptake by forages (plants eaten by livestock), livestock and animal byproducts, such as milk, meat and manure. The EPA terminated UMaine’s grant on May 10, according to its website.
The Passamaquoddy Tribe, specifically the Sipayik Environmental Department at Pleasant Point, planned to assess PFAS in water and fish from watersheds in Tribal and disadvantaged regions of Northeastern Maine to inform the health of those in the area who depend on recreational fisheries as food sources. The Tribe had been in the process of hiring someone to do the research when it received notice of its grant termination on May 12, Cling said.
