America’s dirtiest beaches are also the toughest to reach. Trump’s DOGE made them even harder to clean.

It takes more than three hours by boat to get to Alaska's Montague Island, a narrow strip of land that separates Prince William Sound from the Gulf of Alaska. Although no one lives out here, there are signs of people everywhere.

“Nobody knows that one of the most remote places on the planet that should be absolutely clean is hammered by garbage,” said Erik Pallister. Cleaning up these beaches has become something of a family affair since his dad started coming out here 25 years ago.

“I went out there in the late ’90s,” said Chris Pallister. “It’s not only unsightly; it’s toxic.”

The elder Pallister founded Gulf of Alaska Keeper, or GoAK, and over the years, the nonprofit has hauled hundreds of thousands of pounds of marine debris from hard-to-reach stretches of the state’s southern coastline.

Montague Island’s outer coast is lined with “catcher beaches,” situated in just the right place so that ocean currents, strong winds, and dramatic storms deposit thousands of pounds of garbage here each year. Reefs and rocks make it nearly impossible to navigate by boat, so cleanup crews come here in the summer by helicopter.

Hundreds of giant white, square bundles can be seen from the air. These are supersacks, roughly the size of garbage dumpsters, and crews have spent the last two summers filling them with a myriad of finds: Japanese whiskey bottles, bike helmets, shoes, 1960s-era plastic toys manufactured in Canada, parts from old boats, pieces of mannequins, hundreds upon hundreds of single-use plastic water bottles with Chinese, Korean, and Russian labels.

The crew uses chainsaws to cut up giant chunks of chemically treated wood that wash up. They use serrated knives to cut fathoms of commercial fishing rope and nets from enormous long jams, and they heft hundreds of large plastic fishing buoys from the thick coastal forest that lines the beach.

”It’s depression and joy, this job,” said Daniel Hatley. This is his second summer on staff with GoAK. “ You can see where we’ve cleaned and what’s dirty, but then you come back a year later, and you already see stuff coming back in.”

Under the Biden administration, Congress allocated billions to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for these kinds of projects under the Inflation Reduction Act. GoAk had anticipated a $20 million grant, but after the EPA administrator under the Trump administration canceled the agency’s entire Environmental Justice Program last year, that money was gone.

Erik Pallister said the funding could have extended work for eight years. “We would have built the organization into something that could have been sustainable and built steam over the years to be bigger scale and more impactful,” he said.

Funding could have also paid to ship all those supersacks filled with trash by barge to Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage.

Alaska is in the midst of a budget crisis and not much is manufactured here. Money from the EPA could have paid for the development of a facility to repurpose a lot of that marine debris into a cement-like product used in construction.

“It really left us holding the bag,” said Chris Pallister. Now, he’s not sure what will happen to more than 1.5 million pounds of trash and derelict commercial fishing gear that’s been collected on Montague Island.

To get the trash off the island, Pallister said he has to rework his budget to cover the cost of rising fuel prices. He also didn't budget for the tipping fees at a landfill, where it's likely everything will eventually end up. “That’s gonna increase expenses considerably,” he said.

And just because federal funding is now gone, that doesn’t mean plastic won’t stop piling up on Alaska’s remote coastlines. “We can’t catch up,” said Erik Pallister. “I can’t imagine what it's gonna be like 50 years from now.” It’s a problem, he said, that’s only getting worse.