PROVINCETOWN — In the second week of the new Trump administration, the Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo announcing a “temporary pause” in the “disbursement of all federal financial assistance” — a total of $3 trillion in grant and loan programs that together amount to a third of all federal spending. Agency directors were told to review more than 2,600 federal programs to determine whether they “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” and if so, to cancel them.
By the time that memo was rescinded, staffers answering to Elon Musk were moving to take direct control of the U.S. Treasury’s payments system. On Feb. 2, Musk boasted that he had unilaterally cut off payments to Lutheran Family Services, a group of charities that serve immigrants.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called these actions illegal, and they are being contested in numerous courts — but they sent a shudder through nonprofits around the country, including on the Outer Cape.
Federal funds are essential to the operations of numerous nonprofits here, including Outer Cape Health Services, the Center for Coastal Studies, the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod, and Cape Cod Children’s Place, the leaders of those organizations told the Independent.
Most affordable housing developments here rely on federal money to supplement the rents they charge, including the rentals at Province Landing and Stable Path in Provincetown, at Nauset Green in Eastham, and at Fred Bell Way in Wellfleet, according to Jay Coburn of the Community Development Partnership and Laura Shufelt of the Mass. Housing Partnership.
Numerous arts organizations benefit from U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Rural Development loans, including the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. A USDA loan financed almost a quarter of the $3 million campaign to create Wellfleet Preservation Hall, according to former Executive Director Janet Lesniak.
The USDA is also set to pay the entire cost of a water main replacement on Shank Painter Road in Provincetown — a $1-million grant and a $1.2-million low-interest loan that the town is “in the midst of closing” on, according to DPW Director Jim Vincent.
The $70-million Herring River Restoration Project is entirely financed by federal funds and matching state grants, according to Friends of Herring River’s board chair Dale Rheault. The town of Wellfleet receives direct federal grants to support construction projects, while the Friends receive funds for contract management and environmental monitoring, Rheault said.
While child care on the Outer Cape is primarily funded by vouchers from each town, money from the Mass. Dept. of Public Health covers about a third of the operating budget at Cape Cod Children’s Place, according to Executive Director Erin Sullivan — but those funds come from the federal government, too.
Health Care
Outer Cape Health Services gets 20 to 40 percent of its revenue in most years from just two federal programs, CEO Damian Archer told the Independent — Section 330B Service Area Competition grants and Section 340B Drug Pricing Program revenue.
The AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod also relies on the 340B Drug Pricing Program for about 20 percent of its operating budget, according to CEO Dan Gates.
“The 340B program essentially takes profits from pharmaceutical companies and redirects a portion of them to local health clinics and organizations like the AIDS Support Group” that provide care to vulnerable patients, Gates said. The program enables community health centers and children’s hospitals to buy drugs at significant discounts and use what would have been part of the companies’ profits for program services.
The money “helps support the cost to run a rural health center that has to be open 12 months a year and that’s not allowed to deny care based on someone’s ability to pay,” said Archer. “These grants and supports make up a substantial amount of our income.”
Drug company lobbyists have been trying to chip away at the 340B program in recent years, Gates said. It technically isn’t a grant, “but when I think of programs that could be at risk, 340B is high on that list,” he said.
A third pot of federal money from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, enacted in 1990, comes to both OCHS and the AIDS Support Group through the state Dept. of Public Health, Gates and Archer said.
“Ryan White accounts for the majority of our state funding, and it comes to us monthly,” Gates said, so any interruption in the program “would potentially impact us within weeks.”
Housing at Risk
The housing authorities in Provincetown, Orleans, Brewster, and Harwich are state-funded rather than federally funded, said Laura Shufelt of the Mass. Housing Partnership.
Almost all other affordable housing complexes on Cape Cod, however, including two that are currently under construction — the Province Post apartments in Provincetown and the Residences at Lawrence Hill in Wellfleet — use federal “project-based Section 8 vouchers” to finance their most affordable units.
The Community Development Partnership gets $25,000 a month in project-based Section 8 vouchers for the affordable rentals it manages, said CEO Coburn.
“It’s about 25 percent of our monthly revenue on the 64 units we own or manage,” he said. “That money fills in the gap between what the residents can afford to pay and what it costs to operate these units.”
Other federal grants support the construction of affordable housing, including some that flow through state and county government. But Shufelt said that a loss of federal funding presented the greatest risk to projects that have yet to begin construction.
“This confusion and uncertainty can stop a lot of things from happening,” Shufelt said. “Do banks go forward with loans for these projects when they don’t have certainty about the rest of the capital?”
Science
Since at least the mid-1990s, the majority of funding for right whale and humpback whale programs at the Center for Coastal Studies — including the disentanglement program, aerial surveys, and basic science — has come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to Coastal Studies CEO Rich Delaney.
“Some of that federal money arrives via the state Div. of Marine Fisheries,” Delaney said, “but the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 is what requires the federal government to take these actions for endangered species like right whales and humpbacks.”
Individual research projects are often funded by the National Science Foundation or the Cape Cod National Seashore. Together, state and federal funds are “as much as 40 percent” of the organization’s total budget, Delaney said.
Dale Rheault of the Friends of Herring River said that the $70 million the federal and state governments are putting into the ecological restoration of the river in Wellfleet was expected to generate $100 million in economic activity for the region.
“It’s a huge boon to the Cape — there’s construction jobs, monitoring work, adaptive management, and it’s not relying on the local taxpayer,” Rheault said.
Many of the Outer Cape’s leaders, including Rheault, said that focusing on their organization’s immediate work was their best response to the chaotic news from Washington, D.C.
“This project has 18 permits,” Rheault said. “It’s been decades in the making, and we’re in it for the long haul. We hold these contracts, and we are proceeding.”
