Poor communities threatened by aging sewers see crucial aid slashed under Trump

“I had to turn my back so my children wouldn’t see me cry,” Lyles said.

Cahokia Heights, a mostly Black city where about one-third live in poverty, is among scores of communities nationwide with aging and decrepit wastewater systems that can put people and their homes at risk. Exposure to untreated sewage, which can enter homes by backing up through plumbing or via floods after rainwater overwhelms sewer systems, can cause illness. Such problems are often in rural areas or declining cities without the money or expertise to fix problems on their own.

Now, hundreds of millions in grants and loans promised by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and former President Joe Biden's administration to address racial and economic disparities have been canceled or targeted for elimination under President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice office as part of its war on diversity, equity and inclusion, along with grants to hundreds of projects for infrastructure and climate adaptation in underserved communities.

That included $14 million to install septic systems in majority-Black Alabama counties where many residents must pipe sewage from their homes onto their own property because it has nowhere else to go. In Thomasville, Georgia, the EPA canceled a $20 million grant, almost half to address aging sewer lines in historically Black neighborhoods. The agency said it didn’t align with administration priorities.

The Trump administration also has proposed deep cuts to state revolving loan funds for drinking and wastewater projects. The Biden-era infrastructure bill allocated nearly $50 billion to those funds, with almost half meant for disadvantaged communities.

Congress is considering a compromise bill that rejects the deepest cuts, but would allow lawmakers to direct about half the money to pet projects, rather than allowing states to allocate it.

“Since day one, the Trump EPA has been crystal clear that 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,” the agency told The Associated Press in a written statement.

Advocates, though, say some of the worst health and environment problems are in long-overlooked minority communities, including many that lost funding.

“The mischaracterization of it as DEI really masks how severe this problem is in the United States,” said Catherine Coleman Flowers, who founded the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and helped bring attention to the plight of people in Lowndes County, Alabama.

“It’s an infrastructure issue,” she said. “It’s health and dignity.”

Decades of decline

When it rains hard, sewage sometimes backs up in Patricia Johnson’s toilet and bathtub in her modest Cahokia Heights home, a problem that's gotten worse over the years. Mosquitoes breed in the standing water and high grass outside.

“It is just bad,” Johnson said. “I am just sad because I have never experienced water being such a problem as it is out here.”

Sewer overflows have long been a problem in this city near St. Louis. A 2024 settlement with the U.S. Justice Department requires the city to invest an estimated $30 million in upgrades, and officials told a court they’ve worked to divert floodwater and made other repairs.

The city wouldn’t comment, but records show at least $41 million in mostly state and federal funds have been spent or sought for upgrades, with the city’s engineering firm saying tens of millions more are needed. The city said in a recent court filing that finding money is more difficult under Trump.

That includes hoped-for funding from a Federal Emergency Management Agency infrastructure program — which a federal judge recently ruled was unlawfully ended by the Trump administration — to address flooding in Cahokia Heights and other St. Clair County communities. What's more, the city lost $1.1 million the House had appropriated for a sewer project last year. The Trump administration now says that FEMA program is under review.

At least 17 million Americans are served by the roughly 1,000 wastewater systems nationwide in serious violation of federal pollution limits when they discharge to local waterways. And at least 2.7 million are served by the most troubled — wastewater systems concentrated in rural areas that have consistently and repeatedly violated clean water rules and whose customers earn, on average, nearly $12,000 less per household than the U.S. average.

At the same time, flooding and water quality needs over the next two decades have ballooned to at least $630 billion, according to federal data reviewed by the AP.

Some of those places are stuck with oversized systems they can't afford to maintain as residents and industry have moved away. And some rural areas have neither sewers nor functioning septic systems, with an estimated 2.2 million Americans lacking adequate indoor plumbing, according to the EPA.

The dire conditions can threaten residents' health.

In Shaw, Mississippi — a poor, majority Black town where sewers back up into homes during heavy rains — a 2023 study found that 38% of a small sample of children tested were infected with intestinal parasites like hookworms and 80% had high levels of intestinal inflammation.

In Lowndes County, some residents were sickened by hookworms linked to raw sewage. And Lyles, the Cahokia Heights mom, who is among those who joined a lawsuit over the flooding, said she was infected with H. pylori, a common bacteria that can cause gut inflammation, which she believes came from sewage exposure. She said her doctor thought she must have traveled to a different country.

There is a misperception that such conditions aren’t common in the U.S. anymore, said Theresa Gildner, a human biologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

That's why the need for help is urgent and the struggle to get it so frustrating, advocates say.

Funding from the COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act will make some sewer upgrades in Shaw, where 50 years ago Black residents won a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking the same services as white residents, including sewers. But much more work is needed and the city of fewer than 1,500 can’t afford it, said state Rep. Otis Anthony.

Shaw has lost more than 40% of its population and most of its businesses. Brick is chipping from one- and two-story buildings and painted-over plywood covers many shop windows.

“You have abject poverty,” Anthony said.

Progress in peril

Some conservatives don’t believe the federal government should help fund such projects at all, or that minority and underserved communities should receive special consideration.

Instead, poor places need policies that grow the local economy so they can invest in infrastructure improvements, said Jack Spencer, a senior research fellow for energy and environmental policy with the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“I think that’s up to state and local populations to decide how they prioritize their resources,” said Spencer.

There still are major sources of financing. In November, the EPA announced $6.5 billion for wastewater and drinking water projects through a loan program, plus another $550 million that would be handed to states. There’s a smaller U.S. Department of Agriculture program that supports these needs, too.

But the poorest places will have a harder time getting any of that money, said Sri Vedachalam, a water and climate expert at the infrastructure consulting firm Corvias Infrastructure Solutions. Many struggling communities lack the money, staffing or expertise to conduct needed studies and engineering reports and fill out extensive applications, experts said.

The Trump administration also canceled tens of millions in funding to centers that provided help, creating another hurdle, advocates say. The EPA says it still funds technical support to rural, small and tribal communities.

“If we’re telling communities, ‘You need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or figure this out for yourself,’ OK,” said Rebecca Lewison, executive director at the Center for Energy and Environmental Justice in California, which lost $8 million from a Biden-era grant to help struggling communities. “But to be able to do that, you need assistance.”

Many communities are at a loss about what happens now.

In Alabama, Sherry Bradley said she reworded any material describing a project to install specially engineered septic systems in Lowndes and two other rural counties, trying to stay under the radar as Trump began cutting grants.

“‘Environmental justice,’ we took that out. We took out ‘poverty,'” said Bradley, executive director of the nonprofit Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program, which already had received $8 million for the project. Also deleted: “African American,” “climate change,” “disadvantaged” and “Gulf of Mexico.”

But the grant was canceled anyway, leaving hundreds of residents in limbo and reliant on the same pipes that carry sewage to ravines, ditches and yards. Money from earlier grants helped install 160 systems in Lowndes County and will pay for about 30 more, Bradley said.

State health officials say 600 have asked for help.

Bradley said people are constantly asking when it will be their turn to get a septic system.

“When I look at their faces, I see that they’ve lost hope and that’s not a good feeling,” said Bradley, choking back tears. “We are the forgotten ones.”

Webber reported from Fenton, Michigan, and Wildeman from Hartford, Connecticut.

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