Federal Freeze Halts $250 Million Electric Truck Program at Los Angeles and Long Beach Ports

A $250 million grant meant to help replace diesel trucks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach has been frozen by the Trump administration, as part of a wider federal move to claw back $20 billion in green energy funding, according to reporting by CalMatters.

The program, run by the Maryland-based nonprofit Climate United and announced last October, would have offered affordable leases on new electric heavy-duty trucks to small fleets and individual truckers serving the ports. It was expected to fund roughly 500 electric trucks.

The money is now held by Citibank and remains locked while a legal dispute unfolds among the Environmental Protection Agency, the bank and Climate United. The EPA had threatened to terminate the contracts, and climate groups sued over their lack of access to the funds. They argue that the agency and the bank are illegally withholding money that Congress appropriated through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. A federal judge ordered Citibank to release some of the funds, but an appeals court blocked that order while the case continues.

"We don't have any money at all, not even operational money," Climate United spokesperson Brooke Durham told CalMatters. She said the group is raising philanthropic grants to cover operating costs and payroll, and that all of its projects are "in limbo."

In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the $20 billion program, known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund or the "green bank," of "misconduct, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud." The agency has not produced evidence of those claims. Zeldin has repeatedly cited a Project Veritas video that secretly filmed a man it described as a Biden-era EPA employee saying the agency was "throwing gold bars off the Titanic." Climate United says the accusations do not apply to its programs, noting that its money was allocated before Trump was elected.

The freeze reaches beyond California. According to the lawsuit, it also covers $31.8 million in loans for solar projects in rural Arkansas, $63 million for solar projects with tribal governments and communities, and $30 million for community planning projects, of which $6.35 million had been awarded to 22 projects in 18 states.

The EPA press office told CalMatters that it "was not a party to grant agreements with subrecipients within the Biden-Harris 'Gold Bar' scheme," and so would not have information on the port truck funds.

For the ports, the freeze means the electric truck program cannot move ahead. Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, said the grants were meant to help small operators in an industry running on a "razor thin profit model." An electric big rig can cost $400,000, more than double the price of a new diesel truck, and financing is hard to secure because banks struggle to value a technology with no used market.

Residents of Wilmington, San Pedro, Long Beach and other nearby communities have long fought fumes from port truck traffic, citing asthma, headaches and other respiratory illnesses linked to diesel soot. Paola Vargas, a Carson resident and organizer with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, told CalMatters in December that cleaning up diesel exhaust is "a literal case of life and death for a lot of our community members and our loved ones."

The freeze follows California's decision to abandon a regulation phasing out diesel trucks after the EPA under Trump declined to approve it. State air quality regulators regard the shift to zero-emission vehicles as a key part of cutting severe air pollution and the greenhouse gases that drive climate change.