Deilah Johnson has been riding a roller coaster of emotions as the tribal resources director for the Village of Solomon, a small Alaskan tribe living primarily in the rural and remote city of Nome. 

She needed a burst of adrenaline to meet an application deadline for a federal grant that would lower energy costs for the community. She could breathe a sigh of relief when it was approved. And then she had to hold her breath again when the current administration initiated a freeze on federal funding.

For the first part of 2025, she had no answers. 

“There’s nothing,” Johnson said of the response she was seeking from the program officer managing her grant. 

Johnson began working with that program officer after securing competitive federal grants for projects that would improve the tribe’s energy efficiency, reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and ultimately decrease heating costs for tribal members. 

But once a federal funding freeze took effect, communication abruptly stopped and the access the tribe had to the $2.3 million in grant funding it had won had been cut off.

“I can’t believe this is even happening. We spent countless hours to get everything prepared perfectly to get it funded,” Johnson said while the funds were frozen. “It feels like it’s being ripped from under us.”

In late February, she regained access to the funding after receiving an email from that program officer.

The grant the tribe received was awarded through an Environmental Protection Agency program that had received funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in 2022. Johnson described the opportunities through that program as ones that are “once in a lifetime,” so she did what she could to capture funding that would benefit the future of her tribe.

In Nome, which can only be reached by plane or boat, heating costs are exceptional. Homes and businesses are heated with fuel, and it’s not uncommon for monthly residential costs for fuel alone to reach $600 in the winter. General utility costs are additional. 

“Nobody could afford that,” Johnson said. “It was ridiculous.”

The emissions associated with burning fuel is also incredibly costly to the environment, which doesn’t align with the tribe’s subsistence lifestyle that relies on hunting and fishing for sustenance. Johnson said the grant, aimed at cutting pollution and introducing clean energy solutions by installing solar arrays on public buildings, would allow the tribe to implement programs that protect its vulnerable populations and retain its cultural identity while improving energy efficiency and introducing residential weatherization initiatives.

To bring this project to life, Johnson had initiated partnerships with the three other Nome-based tribes; King Island Native Community, Nome Eskimo Community and Native Village of Council to serve their members. And she began working with Michigan State University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as well as a construction company that was focused on stretching the funding the project received as far as it could. 

She developed and conducted workshops to educate the community about the benefits of solar energy to ensure the project is sustainable into the future. She had created a new position to support the work and had begun vetting applicants. And prior to applying for the $2.3 million grant, she had applied for and received a planning grant of about $150,000 that prepared the conceptual work for implementation. 

If that grant had remained permanently frozen, that initial planning funding would have been a loss and the project would not have been able to move forward without additional philanthropic support. 

“The federal government should be held accountable for what it said it would do,” Johnson said.