North Charleston lawsuit tests U.S. separation of powers

A South Carolina nonprofit is suing the Trump administration in a major case that legal experts say could soon put North Charleston at the center of a raging national debate over the limits of presidential authority and the constitution’s separation of powers.

The 86-page complaint, filed March 19 in Charleston federal court, alleges the Trump administration violated the U.S. Constitution and several federal statutes when it unilaterally froze congressionally-approved grants for 11 nonprofits and six cities across the country.

North Charleston’s Sustainability Institute, which won an $11.4 million Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant in 2024 to build and rehabilitate affordable homes in the city’s Union Heights neighborhood, is the lead plaintiff in the case.

According to the lawsuit, the Trump administration froze, unfroze and again refroze the institute’s grant in a chaotic and opaque process that began in late January. The governmental funding yo-yo is turning the organization upside down, sources say.

“The Sustainability Institute is honored to have been selected … to deliver critically-needed affordable housing, weatherization and residential retrofits to homes in North Charleston,” Bryan Cordell, executive director of the institute, said in a news release. “Continued freezes and disruptions to our work would be catastrophic to the project.”

The legal stakes

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued a series of executive orders that direct federal officials to dismantle departments, fire civil servants and freeze whole categories of federal spending.

The administration says these steps are necessary to bring federal spending under control, and that the president is acting within his constitutional authority. But many legal scholars say the orders violate the constitution’s carefully constructed system of checks and balances, which gives Congress, not the president, final say over how federal dollars are spent.

And that’s the question at the heart of the Charleston case, according to Chapel Hill, N.C., attorney Kym Meyer, litigation director of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs.

“Fundamentally, this is about separation of powers,” Meyer told Statehouse Report on March 20. “Congress has the power to decide how our money is spent, and that’s not what’s happening here.”

Or as the lawsuit puts it plainly: “The president’s executive orders, and the program freezing actions implementing those orders, directly contravene Congress’s directives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other statutes to carry out and fund the statutory programs at issue in this case.”

But even with significant legal issues at stake, Meyer brought the conversation back to the real world impacts of Trump’s actions on her clients and the communities they serve.

“We filed this case in Charleston because we have this wonderful client, the Sustainability Institute, that’s doing really important work to improve lives with affordable housing and it’s being prevented from doing that work,” she said. “So while we’re talking about big constitutional issues, the impact is very real to the people on the ground.”

The people on the ground

Almost 60 years ago, the historically Black Union Heights neighborhood was split by the arrival of Exit 218, part of the larger I-26 project connecting Charleston and Columbia.

But when the S.C. Department of Transportation abandoned the exit in favor of the newer Port Access Road, residents saw an opportunity to reknit the community by using the now vacant land for affordable housing.

And that’s what the Sustainability Institute’s Project 218, funded by the EPA grant at issue in the lawsuit, was designed to do.

“This project has been planned with the community for years,” the Sustainability Institute’s Cordell told Statehouse Report. “We’re really excited about getting it done.”

But as Cordell notes, the project is larger than just 10 new units of affordable housing on the former Exit 218 site. It also includes major renovations for 50 other homes in the neighborhood, as well as flooding mitigation and green energy options.

“We want this work to last for generations,” Cordell said. “This project is about the long term resiliency of the community, and that’s why the EPA invested in it.”

North Charleston Mayor Reggie Burgess, who grew up in the Union Heights neighborhood, spoke of the project’s importance at a Feb. 4 groundbreaking event, saying it was “personal” for him.

“We’re at a point in time when we’re reconnecting Union Heights now,” Burgess told the crowd of neighborhood residents. “So, continue to pray hard for this development, because we’re going to make it happen.”

A hearing in the case will be scheduled.