By Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney for Capital B News.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Robert Thomas' home is still standing after the coffee-colored floodwaters of Hurricane Helene rushed through his community, but everything that made up his life has been swept away.

Thirteen days after Helene first made landfall in the U.S., it is known that at least 230 people died during the storm's surge, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately sent out more than 7,000 employees and thousands of volunteers poured into the region with tons of food, clothes, water, and other supplies, it still took days for aid to reach some people - particularly Black low-income people, the elderly, and those living with disabilities.

"There's always a major disparity," said Thomas, who remains without electricity or clean water, but has already been denied aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because his home didn't receive any physical flood or wind damage.

"You see which communities get up and running quicker," he said. Within two days of the catastrophic storm, he said he noticed utility workers restoring power in the majority white and wealthy areas of Asheville.

He, like most people who've been on social media over the past two weeks, quickly saw conspiracy theories about how the federal government was planning, or not planning, to respond to the storm.

Helene's devastation far exceeded most people's predictions, pointing to why it took FEMA time to get to some of the hardest hit areas such as western North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Most residents Capital B spoke to ultimately applauded the federal response to the storm. Yet, it is in those long days between the storm's destruction and when people can get back to their lives where stories that fuel political discontent - and in Hurricane Helene's case, political disinformation - can take root.

The social media platform X has helped fuel a firestorm of conspiracies and politically charged lies, which may have severe implications for the election. Some conspiracy theories, mainly pushed by right-wing actors, claim that FEMA abandoned some parts of North Carolina so that the Biden administration could mine lithium there for electric vehicles; that FEMA ran out of money because the Biden administration has diverted disaster funds to new arriving migrants; and that the government was bulldozing communities to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. Even North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson - the current Republican gubernatorial nominee - pushed disinformation online about recovery efforts and days later skipped a vote on hurricane relief support for a second time.

Some Black residents in Asheville and Augusta told Capital B that they don't have electricity and elections are the last thing on their minds. Asheville is about 11.2% Black and Augusta is 60% Black. In Georgia, the voter registration deadline has already passed, and in North Carolina, it is just a day away, on Oct. 11. After storms, communities usually have fewer in-person voting polls, and more mail-in ballots are lost or destroyed. And those who originally planned to vote feel like they won't have enough time or access to information to cast an educated vote.

"It is absolutely a reality that voter turnout is going to decline because at this point, everybody is so discombobulated and distracted, who is really going to want to go to a damn poll at this point when you don't have a house?" said Falasha Talbert, a mother of 10 and small-business owner in Augusta.

Typically, Black voter participation in North Carolina and Georgia is above the national average for Black voters, but based on a series of studies, there is an expectation that voting in the impacted regions will decline by around 10%. Augusta's Richmond County was just one of two eastern Georgia counties impacted by the storm that turned blue in 2020. Likewise, Asheville's Buncombe County was the only storm-impacted western North Carolina county outside Charlotte that went Democrat.

As Hurricane Milton causes destruction across Florida, advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to heed what has already been seen across the region. "It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc," a coalition of community groups wrote to DeSantis.

"People are tired"

However, as right-wing talking points have infiltrated the disaster recovery ecosystem, it may be backfiring for Republicans - particularly because of Project 2025's vision to "defund" FEMA. After storms, elections can become more competitive if a candidate leans more anti-environment.

"FEMA has helped some people, even if they didn't help me," said Thomas, who has been assisting in relief efforts as well as voter registration in Asheville.

"But I wouldn't say that they need to be disbanded just because I didn't get what I needed from them, and [Hurricane Helene] shows the need of FEMA. So, [former President Donald Trump] talking about disbanding FEMA, and me being in a situation where I need FEMA, pushes him further away."

Thomas, 37, is a staunch supporter of Black reparations - the need for which he said has been made only more clear after Hurricane Helene's impact, but has also contributed to a lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming election because no major candidate has a reparations plan.

In Asheville, immediately after the storm hit, Keynon Lake turned his nonprofit group's headquarters into a resource distribution center. Over the week since, he and other community activists have distributed 10 to 15 passenger vans worth of water, food, and cleaning supplies every day to Black and brown victims, including those in nursing homes.

"We are still digging through the rubble and trying to find a way out," said Lake, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That. Other places routinely hit by hurricanes like Florida and Louisiana have well-oiled response ecosystems, he said, but North Carolina's has been piecemeal.

"Everyone is in survival mode and a mental lull to where it's like, 'I can't even take a shower today, so why would I be talking about next month, about politics. I don't know if people will get back there before the election."

Tomiko Ambrose Murray, a political organizer in Asheville, laid it out plainly.

"We are trying to figure out how to get Black folks to participate in the election; I think there can be a narrative that Black people don't care about climate change, and that's just false," she said.

But, "people here are sleep-deprived, aren't able to work their jobs, don't have money, or maybe possibly having been denied by FEMA, No electricity, no water, you know, those kinds of things, not being able to shower."

"And so people are on the front lines trying to support their communities. Connect people with what they need, and they're exhausted, and it's been like day after day after day. People are tired."

The exhaustion and fatigue last long after the storm and can shape how people view the government for the rest of their lives. Just ask Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Talbert says the fallout of Helene has also made racial inequities more prominent in eastern Georgia. The day after the storm, she said she had to wait hours just to get snacks from the gas station because there were no full service grocery stores within accessible distance of her majority-Black community. As people struggled to get food and gas because of price-gouging, chaos ensued. She witnessed a shooting, as well as a woman that was beginning to give birth in a car because the hospital was inaccessible.

"There was no plan in place for this, and it was obvious," she said. Talbert said she believes the aftermath of the storm, in addition to both Democrats and Republicans not being proactive in the community before the storm, will make it easy to ignore the election.

The false promise of a "climate haven"

As much of western North Carolina slept in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene had done the unimaginable by overtopping rivers in the mountain region.

Last year, Asheville ranked second in the country for the most move-ins from new residents compared with residents moving out. A lot of the growth, residents and researchers have explained, was due to the city's designation as a "climate haven" for its mild temperatures, low wildfire and drought risk, and its distance - 300 miles - from the coast, and the storms and sea level rise that brings.

In the area around Asheville, rain swelled the watershed that twists and turns for almost 1,000 square miles, running water off the natural mountainous terrain into the paved and quickly growing city of 95,000. Because the situation developed overnight, Lisa Whittenburg, a mother of three, had no time to evacuate. At more than 400 miles wide, Helene was the third-widest storm in recorded history. Even as the storm battered Florida and Georgia the night before, most residents in the area had no idea of the storm's historic length and ability to turn Asheville into a raging river. There was nowhere for the water to go but up.

After watching the floodwaters rise and swallow the first two floors of her apartment complex in the early hours of Hurricane Helene, Whittenburg accepted her fate: "It got to the point where I had just accepted it, like, 'God it is your will. If I'm not supposed to be here, I won't be.'"

So, by early morning, the family and more than a dozen other residents sat trapped on the third floor of their subsidized housing complex. There wasn't much up there with them outside of an inflatable air mattress that the family brought up in their quick thinking as they evacuated their apartment. One issue: there wasn't a pump. It did not stop Whittenburg's adult daughter Cynia from using all her might to blow up the mattress with her mouth.

"'Mama, we getting out of here,'" Whittenburg recalled her daughter saying.

But Whittenburg wanted to take her chances on the roof. She didn't know what was in the floodwaters, which are known to be full of toxins, sewage, and bacteria, and she thought to herself, "I'm gonna sink, right?" So, she waited, even as the waters threw a tractor-trailer into her apartment complex and the stilts it stood on began to crack.

Two weeks later, she is still fighting for more concrete answers from FEMA. She applied for funding and said she was approved, but the total amount and details have been confusing. Whittenburg said she no longer has anywhere to stay with electricity in the area. Sleeping or staying in her apartment, filled with muck and debris, is akin to staying in "quick sand."

"I just need to be somewhere where things are functioning," Whittenburg explained as she was packing up to leave Asheville to stay with her sister in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. "People like me don't have anything. ... I've never had to do nothing like this before."


This story was originally produced by Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney of Capital B News as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.

A new report found fossil fuel lobbyists in two states with strong transparency and disclosure laws were not making full disclosures, including Washington state.

Washington ranked eighth in the country with a "C-plus" in the report from F Minus, an advocacy group tracking fossil-fuel lobbying across the nation. The audit found fossil fuel lobbyists in Washington state made disclosures only 8% of the time.

James Browning, founder and executive director of F Minus, said the lobbyists frequently work for both fossil fuel and climate advocacy groups.

"Refusing to disclose their work for oil and gas companies shows that they're keenly aware that this can be bad for their image, that they can be seen as villains on climate and that's bad for business," Browning contended. "It's bad for their image."

Browning pointed to the Pacific Whale Watch Association and Chevron sharing a lobbying firm.

Browning noted the audit from F Minus has been sent to the state's public disclosure commission but he has not heard back. He was encouraged when the Public Disclosure Commission in October started asking lobbyists what legislation they worked on. However, preliminary filings are only slightly better, he added. In fact, Browning pointed out one lobbyist has been copying and pasting the same disclosure for all of its fossil fuel lobbying since 2018.

"Clearly the lobbyists don't take this seriously," Browning asserted. "It's really outrageous given the cascading climate impacts in Washington state; extreme heat, fires and just the fear we all have to live with of the climate crisis."

In the report, 27 states received failing grades over the transparency of their lobbyist disclosure laws.

By Kristoffer Tigue, Dennis Pillion, Dylan Baddour and Marianne Lavelle for Inside Climate News.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When a rare tornado swept through the north side of Minneapolis, Michelle Neal scrambled for cover at a fast-food restaurant. "It was unreal-we could have died," she told Minnesota Public Radio. "McDonald's saved me."

It's the kind of scenario that Julia Nerbonne, executive director of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, wants to make sure communities are better prepared for as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather. The faith-based nonprofit hopes to transform churches and other congregations into emergency shelters with solar power and battery storage to withstand power outages-especially in historically disadvantaged communities, like north Minneapolis, which have long been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment.

"We want to have a building," she said, "in which they can have a cooling place, in which they can refrigerate their medication-a place where they can be with the community in the midst of a crisis."

Around the country, nonprofits and other community organizations like Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light were hoping these sorts of projects would receive funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has $3 billion to spend on environmental justice community grants through Sept. 30, 2026. But the Biden administration has only been able to award about half the money so far, and experts say the unspent 50 percent can most likely be clawed back by President-elect Donald Trump-a blow to communities of color and poor rural communities that had long waited for help like this.

Among the threatened initiatives is the EPA's Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking Program, which dedicated $600 million in block grants for projects aimed at tackling climate and environmental justice issues in disadvantaged communities. The money has been hailed by advocates as one of the most important federal investments ever made in closing the nation's long-standing socioeconomic and racial gaps.

The Biden administration has so far awarded nearly $266 million, according to an EPA database, leaving more than half-or just over $334 million-vulnerable to reversal efforts from Trump officials or Republican lawmakers. "EPA continues to work through its rigorous process to obligate the funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the Thriving Communities Grantmakers program," said Nick Conger, the EPA's communications director.

Last week, the EPA opened up the first round of applications for the Thriving Communities program, giving hopeful applicants like Nerbonne less than two months to navigate the complicated federal grantmaking process before Trump is sworn in. In fact, several EPA regions have yet to open their application processes, leaving some groups worried they won't be able to complete their applications on time.

"It just seems like an incredibly missed opportunity. I'd feel disappointed about that," Nerbonne said, when asked how she would feel if the program's funding was rescinded under Trump. "Congregations aren't talking about politics. They're ready to get to work serving their community and they're tired of politics, especially after this election."

Republicans Target Environmental Justice Funding

The IRA's idea for addressing historic environmental injustice through a community grant program was taken from the sprawling Environmental Justice for All legislation originally introduced in 2020 by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz) and the late Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.).

"We approached it with the fundamental belief that communities know what communities need best," said Grijalva in an email.

But Congressional Republicans have been vocal about their intention to cut or limit the environmental justice grant program, characterizing it as a form of cronyism, providing support to political allies of Democrats and opponents of fossil fuels.

"The EPA is awarding taxpayer dollars to special interest groups committed to a radical energy agenda," wrote U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) in a House Energy and Commerce Committee report, released just before Election Day. "Enriching nonprofit organizations to spread radical, left-leaning ideology is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. These programs demand rigorous scrutiny and meticulous oversight."

Trump himself suggested in a 2023 campaign video that he could "simply choke off the money" allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Typically, Congress would have to pass new "rescission" legislation to take away unspent money that Congress previously appropriated. Republicans could use the appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 2025, which began in October and now appears likely to be in the hands of the newly elected Congress and Trump, to do so. But in order to avoid the threat of a filibuster in the Senate, they instead could use a budget reconciliation bill that only needs a simple majority-the approach Democrats used to pass the IRA. Republicans are aiming to embark on a reconciliation bill soon after taking office in order to extend and expand Trump's 2017 tax cuts.

Ending environmental justice grantmaking is also part of the vision laid out in Project 2025, the policy roadmap that conservative groups drew up for Trump's second term. Although Trump professed no familiarity with Project 2025 during the campaign, he has named authors of the plan to key positions in his new administration, including tapping Russell Vought, his former budget chief, to head the Office of Management and Budget again. Project 2025 called for pausing and reviewing all environmental justice grants in light of the Supreme Court's recent decisions against affirmative action.

The Thriving Communities grant program has become a particular target of Republicans, who singled out one of its recipients and accused it of being "radical" and "anti-American." The Climate Justice Alliance, a California-based organization, is one of 11 regional grantmaker organizations that were initially awarded $50 million each from the Thriving Communities program. Those groups would then disseminate $40 million of their funds as subgrants to community organizations in their regions.

The Climate Justice Alliance is the only regional grantmaker that has not received any of its funding, sparking speculation that GOP rancor could be to blame. In May, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the highest ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, criticized the group for its support of Palestinians in Gaza and its opposition to Israel, calling its members "radical," "anti-American," and "antisemitic."

Conger, the EPA spokesperson, said the "EPA continues to review the grant for the Climate Justice Alliance," but provided no further details.

KD Chavez, the Climate Justice Alliance's executive director, said that the group's pro-Gaza advocacy is constitutionally protected speech that is separate from the work it would fund under the Thriving Communities program. "This grant money would only be used as intended by Congress, going towards things like air quality and asthma, water quality and lead, asbestos contamination," she said.

If the group's political views are the reason for the holdup in funding, Chavez said it could put at risk any social justice or progressive work that receives federal funding. "This could really be setting up a horrific First Amendment precedent moving forward for any type of organization across civil society," Chavez said.

Other groups involved in the EPA grant program pushed back against the GOP attacks as well. In addition to the 11 regional grantmaker organizations, another 18 institutions were chosen to act as technical assistance centers-known officially as Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers, or TCTACs-to help community organizations navigate the often complicated federal grant application process.

Bonnie Keeler, a University of Minnesota public affairs associate professor who runs the Midwest region's TCTAC, said it's a misrepresentation of her center's work to say it channels federal funding to "left-leaning activist or extremist organizations," adding that the program deserves broad bipartisan support.

"The TCTACs do not advance a particular policy agenda, we respond to requests for assistance wherever they come from," Keeler said. "To date, we have responded to over 400 requests for technical assistance from urban, rural and tribal communities seeking assistance with everything from energy efficiency goals, to cleaning up brownfields, to managing hazardous waste, to reducing indoor air pollution."

How Far Will Trump Go?

In the early 1970s, then-President Richard Nixon had a problem. A Democratic-controlled Congress wanted to fund highway improvements, drug rehabilitation and a number of other initiatives that the Republican president believed were "undisciplined" and "fiscally irresponsible."

So Nixon decided to withhold funds in the budget that he didn't agree with, sparking a constitutional struggle that resulted in the passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. That law, which is still in effect today, prohibits a president or other government officials from refusing to release congressionally appropriated funds and essentially substituting their own funding decisions for those of Congress.

The legislation also defines when federal funding has been "obligated," a legal term for when a contract has been signed between a federal agency and the recipient of federal funds, such as an organization applying for a grant, said Jeremy Kalin, a finance attorney for the law firm Avisen Legal. That means the $266 million dedicated to environmental justice under the Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed in 2022, and already obligated is protected from being rescinded, Kalin said.

But legal experts, including Kalin, aren't sure if Trump and his officials will respect that federal law and refrain from trying to seize or rescind obligated funds, pointing to statements made by Trump and Vought.

Vought and members of right-wing think tanks he is associated with have argued that the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 is unconstitutional, saying that Article II of the Constitution, which obligates the president to "faithfully execute" the law, also allows a president to forbid enforcement of the law.

Trump appears to agree with that interpretation. In a statement announcing Vought's nomination last week, Trump bragged about Vought's experience as a deregulator, saying, "Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government."

"Russell Vought," Kalin said, "may stretch the bounds of the Impoundment Control Act ... and just force people to stop it through the courts."

If that's the case, Kalin said, some funds-even those protected as "obligated" funds under the Impoundment Control Act-may be subject to reversals by the Trump administration, and only funds that get fully dispersed to organizations before Trump takes office may be safe from those efforts.

Trump has already tested this theory. During his first term in office, he withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while pressuring President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to open a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO, later ruled that Trump's actions violated the Impoundment Control Act.

Trump will have an opportunity to appoint a new head of GAO next year when the 15-year term of the current Comptroller General ends, giving him a chance to choose who will have direct oversight of any decisions he makes to withhold funding.

If Trump decides to withhold funds, it will most certainly trigger legal fights that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. The high court has never directly weighed in on the subject, however, but the court's conservative majority has indicated it is willing to take an expansive view on presidential power.

"Time Is Just Not on the Side of the Grantees"

The short amount of time, roughly seven weeks, before Trump takes office, could also be discouraging some community groups from applying for federal environmental justice grants at all. In some cases, nonprofits see it as a reason to rely less on federal support to do their work.

Caleb Roberts applied for a $1.5 million grant earlier in November from another IRA-funded environmental justice program. He hoped to use the money to hire more employees at his nonprofit, Dallas-based Downwinders at Risk, to conduct door-to-door screenings to check residents' homes for conditions that cause asthma. But now he's unsure he'll ever see that money.

"We think we'll definitely run into some funding issues," he said. "Starting day one after inauguration, those things are probably under fire."

Another nonprofit, Alabama-based We Matter Community Association, said it plans to apply for a Thriving Communities grant to purchase 1,200 acres of land in the city of Prichard, on which it plans to build community amenities, including a community center, athletic fields, commercial space and affordable housing. But Carletta Davis, the group's president, said the organization will likely rely less on federal support in the future.

"[The election] is the reason why We Matter is really solely focused on trying to create a way to sustain itself without having to go through governmental grants," she said. "I think that our model is probably going to be the model going forward for EJ organizations."

Some organizations aren't sure if applying for a federal environmental justice grant is worth the effort at all. Applications for the Thriving Communities grant program, the largest single program of federal environmental justice block grants, haven't even opened in the EPA-designated area that includes Texas and Louisiana, home to the nation's largest petrochemical complexes and environmental justice communities.

"At this time, the groups we know of that may be interested still need more time to understand the grant program and whether they will apply," said Vanessa Toro Barragán, a senior program officer at the Houston-based Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, which isn't involved with the grant program.

But time may not be a luxury community groups can afford at the moment, should Trump officials and Republican lawmakers follow through with their threats.

Employees of organizations that work closely with the Thriving Communities program, also expressed concern that community groups would struggle to complete a complicated federal grant application before Trump takes office in just seven weeks, agreeing to comment anonymously to safeguard their prospects as potential grantees.

"Time is just not on the side of the grantees," one employee told Inside Climate News.

Still, organizations involved with the federal grant programs are encouraging community groups to apply and hope to see a big turnout.

"The fact is that this program, it still exists, and it doesn't make sense to turn away from an opportunity that is still there while it is still there," said Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the partner organizations helping to recruit applicants to the Thriving Communities program.

Keeler, who runs the Midwest technical assistance center at the University of Minnesota, expressed a similar sentiment. "The future of these programs is uncertain," she said. "That said, all we can do is continue the work we've started. We get new requests for support every week and we'll keep responding to those requests for technical assistance as long as we are able."


Kristoffer Tigue, Dennis Pillion, Dylan Baddour and Marianne Lavelle wrote this article for Inside Climate News.


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A new report says fossil-fuel lobbyists in two states with strong transparency and disclosure laws are not making full disclosures - including in Maryland.

Maryland ranks seventh in the country and gets a grade of C-plus in the report from a group called F Minus - which tracks fossil-fuel lobbying efforts across the U.S.

James Browning, executive director of F Minus, said Maryland has strong laws requiring lobbyists to disclose their salaries and the bills they're working on.

But its audit found these disclosures are being made less than 50% of the time. Browning said some lobbyists also appear to have major conflicts of interest.

"What we also found is this rampant culture of lobbyists being sort of double agents for oil and gas companies," said Browning, "at the same time they're working for climate-conscious institutions."

Browning pointed to Johns Hopkins University's lobbying firm actively opposing a climate bill on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute. The lobbying firm didn't disclose that conflict.

Browning said the audit from F Minus has been sent to the state's ethics commission. He said he hopes that will spur additional audits on lobbying practices in the state.

He added that new policies on reporting would help keep their activities during legislative sessions transparent.

"There has to be a reality check in the middle of Maryland's three-month session - let's say at the end of February - where everyone has to disclose what they're doing," said Browning. "The way the law is written now, lobbyists can wait until May. The session is over in April."

Twenty-seven states received failing grades in the report for the overall lack of transparency in their lobbyist disclosure laws.



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