US Federal Climate and Ecological Funding Mechanisms: An Institutional Inventory

This dataset inventories the federal programme streams and regulatory instruments that finance or mandate urban ecological governance in the United States, and codes each on three dimensions: where the obligation to spend originates, whether the programme funds any mechanism connecting ecological evidence to planning decisions, and what happened to it during the 2025–2026 funding reversal. The inventory is not a ULE scoring record and does not apply the ULE scoring scale. It examines the E5 condition — epistemic translation — from the funding side rather than the jurisdictional side, and it treats the 2025–2026 reversal as a natural experiment: one external shock applied simultaneously to fourteen programmes whose legal designs differed. Why this inventory exists Analyses of US climate finance typically record funding volume. This inventory records **funding architecture**. Between 2022 and 2024 US cities received the largest federal climate investment in their history. Between 2025 and 2026, executive action, budget reconciliation, rescissions and the ordinary appropriations process removed much of it. What was removed and what survived did not divide by programme size, agency or policy area. The inventory is structured to make the line that it did divide along legible and testable. Coding scheme Two of the three codings were assigned independently of each other, from different evidence. That they align is the principal finding rather than a design feature. `durability_class` — where the obligation to spend originates | Class | Definition || **L1** Statutory or judicial anchor | The obligation arises from a court order, consent order or permit condition and does not depend on an annual appropriation decision || **L2** Standing institutional anchor | The obligation arises from a standing partnership agreement or formula allocation: appropriation-dependent, but recurrent and institutionally held || **L3** Appropriation-contingent | The programme rests on an annual or multi-year appropriation that an appropriations decision can end || **L4** Project-contingent | The programme rests on a competitive award cycle and ends when the award ends | Assignment is made from the authorising instrument named in `statutory_basis`, not from the programme's size, duration or perceived stability. `e5_level` — does the programme fund evidence integration? | Level | Definition || **0** None | The programme funds no mechanism connecting monitoring findings to planning decisions || **1** Partial, compliance-bounded | An evidence-revision cycle operates, but remains inside a regulatory compliance chain and does not reach planning authority || **2** Required | The programme requires that ecological evidence reach planning decisions | Assignment is made from the presence or absence of a funded feedback mechanism in programme documentation, without reference to the durability class. `outcome_2025_26` — what happened during the reversal | Value | Definition || Survived unaffected | Continued without interruption through the reversal || Active but proposed for cut | Operating, but proposed for reduction or elimination in the FY2026 budget request, or with its permanent authorisation removed from agency budget justifications || Paused, terminated, repealed or closed | Disbursements paused, awards terminated, statutory basis repealed, or the programme effectively closed to new applicants | Findings 1 · No programme requires evidence integration. Of fourteen streams, none is coded at level 2. Nine fund no mechanism at all; five fund one partially, and all five are partial in the same way — an evidence-revision cycle operates inside a compliance chain and stops at the boundary of planning authority. The distribution across domains is uneven: two of three regulatory programmes support a partial mechanism, as do two of four climate and community-development programmes and one of three research programmes. **None of the four infrastructure programmes does.** Programmes that build ecological capital fund the asset and evaluate its completion; none funds the institutional relationship that would make the asset consequential for a planning decision. 2 · Durability tracked legal form, not scale or performance. | Durability class | Survived | Proposed for cut | Curtailed | n || L1 Statutory or judicial anchor | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 || L2 Standing institutional anchor | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 || L3 Appropriation-contingent | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 || L4 Project-contingent | 0 | 0 | 4 | 4 | None of the four programmes anchored in law or in a standing institution was withdrawn. Of the ten resting on an appropriation or a competitive award, six were curtailed and two more are proposed for elimination or reduction — eight of ten either lost or under threat. The project-contingent category was cleared entirely. The magnitudes make the point concrete: a USD 27 billion programme lost more than USD 16 billion in terminations and, under section 60103, its statutory basis along with its disbursements; over the same period a consent-order obligation running materially over budget and behind schedule was not touched. Nor was the pattern produced by executive action alone — the Section 319 nonpoint source programme, appropriated at USD 174.3 million in the previous fiscal year, was proposed for elimination through the ordinary appropriations process. 3 · Partial evidence integration appears only where an anchor exists.** Of the five programmes supporting a partial evidence-integration mechanism, four are anchored in law or in a standing institution. Of the ninesupporting none, not one is. The single partial case resting on a competitive award — the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grants — was terminated and returned only through litigation. Evidence integration does not appear in federal programme design as a feature a well-designed grant can add on its own; where it appears, it is attached to an obligation that outlasts the appropriation funding it. Contents | File | Contents || `us_federal_climate_funding_inventory.csv` | 14 records, 15 fields per programme, including the three coded fields defined above || `US_Federal_Funding_Inventory_Report.pdf` | Human-readable report generated from the CSV file | The CSV file is the authoritative version of the data. Field definitions | Field | Meaning || `program_name` · `administering_agency` | Programme and the agency that administers it || `programme_domain` | Research, infrastructure, regulatory, climate, or community development || `statutory_basis` | The Act, section or instrument from which the programme derives authority || `what_it_funds` | The object of the expenditure || `funds_E5_evidence_integration` | Narrative statement of whether and how the programme funds evidence integration || `e5_level` | The coded value, 0–2, per the scheme above || `durability_layer` | Narrative statement of where the spending obligation originates || `durability_class` | The coded value, L1–L4, per the scheme above || `status_2022_2024` · `status_2025_2026` | Programme status before and after the reversal || `outcome_2025_26` | The coded value per the scheme above || `ecoull_relevance` | How the programme bears on ecology-oriented urban living lab governance || `source_document` · `verification_status` | Source and the date and basis of verification | Verification All fourteen records were verified against primary or contemporaneous sources, most recently on 5 September 2026. The `verification_status` field records the basis and date for each. One record was corrected on 5 September 2026. The standing federal–municipal research partnership exemplified by the NYC Urban Field Station was previously recorded as an NSF partnership. It is not: the Urban Field Station is a USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station and NYC Parks partnership established in 2006, joined by the Natural Areas Conservancy in 2013, now convening more than ninety partner organisations. NSF supports urban ecological research on a separate footing, through the Urban LTER network. The record and its administering-agency field have been corrected accordingly. Four statuses were live and moving at compilation and were held open until confirmed: **USDA Urban and Community Forestry.** The Inflation Reduction Act appropriated USD 1.5 billion under section 23003; in September 2023 USDA announced over USD 1 billion in awards to 385 recipients. Awards were frozen in early 2025 and subsequently terminated. On 14 August 2025 a federal court partially granted a preliminary injunction enjoining the termination. Section 10201 of Public Law 119-21 (2025) then rescinded unobligated funds under IRA section 23003(a)(2). The outcome divides cleanly: obligated awards protected by judicial injunction continued, unobligated balances were removed by statute. **IIJA coastal resilience and ecosystem restoration.** Executive Order 14154 (January 2025) paused disbursement of IIJA- and IRA-appropriated funds. The pause proved partial: NOAA continued to operate IIJA-funded habitat restoration and coastal resilience competitions through 2025. The National Coastal Resilience Fund carries a fixed multi-year statutory allocation — USD 100 million per year for fiscal years 2022 through 2026 — which proved more resistant to executive pause than discretionary supplemental funding. **Clean Water Act Section 319.** Appropriated at USD 174.3 million in FY2025; the FY2026 EPA budget request proposed eliminating the programme in full. Coded as active but proposed for cut, because the threat arrives through the appropriations process rather than through executive action. **NSF Coastlines and People.** Coded as closed rather than active: the most recent solicitation, NSF 21-613, closed to proposals on 6 December 2021 and no successor call has been issued. Relationship to other records in this series This record differs in kind from the others: it is a programme inventory rather than a ULE scoring record, and its unit of analysis is the federal programme rather than the metropolitan jurisdiction. It connects to the series through the E5 condition, whose definition it takes from the codebook. | Record | Type | DOI || Codebook and scoring protocol | Method | 10.5281/zenodo.21645631 || Netherlands and Türkiye | ULE scoring | 10.5281/zenodo.20811366 || Istanbul and New York City | ULE scoring | 10.5281/zenodo.21649244 || Three US metropolitan regions | ULE scoring | 10.5281/zenodo.21675193 || US federal funding mechanisms | Programme inventory | 10.5281/zenodo.23037941 | Finding 3 above bears on the sequential dependency that the ULE framework treats as a working hypothesis. The companion metropolitan analysis tests that hypothesis directly and finds it conditional: the ordering holds for institutional development that proceeds internally, and does not hold where external legal compulsion supplies a later condition directly. The pattern reported here is the federal counterpart of that finding — evidence integration appears attached to anchored obligations rather than accumulating through a sequence. The framework was developed at the metropolitan scale; this record observes the related pattern at a different unit of analysis, which is why it is deposited separately rather than folded into a scoring record. Access Files are openly available under CC BY 4.0 from the date of deposit. The coding scheme, the field definitions and all findings are reproduced in this description, so that the evidentiary basis of the analysis is legible from the record page itself as well as from the files. Reuse The inventory is intended to be useful beyond the associated manuscript. Researchers tracking US climate funding volatility, or examining which federal instruments survived the 2025–2026 reversal, can use it directly. The coding scheme is designed to be extended to further programmes; extensions should cite this record and state whether the durability and evidence-integration codings were assigned independently, since the alignment between them is the finding at issue. Citation Çelik Yılmaz, Ö. (2026). *US Federal Climate and Ecological Funding Mechanisms: An Institutional Inventory*[Data set]. Zenodo. 10.5281/zenodo.23037941 Funding Prepared with the support of a TÜBİTAK 2218 National Postdoctoral Research Fellowship awarded by decision of 21 January 2026, on ecology-oriented urban living labs and watershed governance.