Washington Proposed Zeroing Out the Air-Monitor Grant Twice. It Still Funds $263 Million Short of the Job.

EPA does not run the monitors that measure the air over most American cities.▸ States, counties, and a handful of tribal governments do — roughly 155 separate agencies, per the National Association of Clean Air Agencies (NACAA)'s own April 2025 testimony to Congress, operating in 40 states plus D.C. and four territories. The money that keeps their monitors running, their permits moving, and their inspectors in the field comes overwhelmingly from one place: a single Clean Air Act grant program, authorized under sections 103 and 105 of the law, that EPA calls the Categorical Grant for State and Local Air Quality Management. The President's budget has now proposed zeroing that grant out entirely, two years running — and Congress, both times, put the money back.

EPA's FY2026 Congressional Justification (submitted July 2025) proposed cutting the entire $235.6 million FY2025 level for this grant to zero, arguing that "the responsibility for local environmental air quality management programs is best placed with states and localities."▸ Congress disagreed: the Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026 (P.L. 119-74), enacted January 23, 2026, funded EPA at $8.82 billion overall — $4.66 billion, or 112%, more than the President's $4.16 billion request — and kept the air-quality categorical grant alive. EPA's own FY2027 Congressional Justification (submitted April 2026) shows the actual FY2026 Enacted Operating Plan figure: $236.672 million. That same document proposes eliminating the grant again for FY2027, using nearly identical language. FY2027 appropriations have not yet been decided.

Restoring the money isn't the same as fully funding the work.▸ Based on a 2023 survey of its member agencies, NACAA's formal FY2026 funding recommendation (adopted October 2024) asked Congress to "provide $500 million in federal grants to state and local air agencies to carry out current programs and new challenges expected in the near future." Measured against the actual FY2026 enacted figure of $236.672 million, that leaves a gap of roughly $263 million a year, even after Congress rejected the elimination proposal.

The shortfall isn't new.▸ NACAA's testimony notes that federal grants to state and local air agencies "were not much higher in FY 2024 than 20 years ago" in nominal dollars — a real decline once inflation is factored in — even as, in the association's words, "federal grants were originally intended to cover 60 percent of the cost of implementing the [Clean Air Act], [but] they cover less than a quarter of that amount today."

The dollar figure translates directly into staffing.▸ NACAA's testimony states plainly: "federal grants fund 25-98% of staff positions at various agencies" — meaning some state or local air programs would lose barely a quarter of their budget without this grant, while others would lose nearly all of it. Without the money, the association warned appropriators, "significant layoffs would occur, with some agencies indicating they would cease operations entirely," and reductions could force "agencies to reduce staff by 25% or more." The practical effect, per the same testimony: agencies "forced to reduce monitoring sites to federally required minimums or eliminate networks entirely," with rural communities — which depend on these agencies most acutely during wildfire smoke events — losing coverage first.

The $263 million gap cited here is this piece's own calculation — the flat $500 million figure NACAA has used in testimony across multiple fiscal years, compared against the specific, verified FY2026 Enacted Operating Plan figure from EPA's own FY2027 budget justification. NACAA's own testimony computes a similar gap against a different, earlier-year baseline that does not fully reconcile with EPA's published FY2024 actual figure, so that framing is not repeated here.