This is a big win for the Trump administration on a fight that has been brewing for months. An appeals court ruled yesterday that the Trump EPA can terminate $16 billion in climate funds which had been handed out by the Biden administration just before he left office. I’ll get into the history of this particular fight below but the news this week is that those frozen funds won’t be going to the environmental groups after all.
An appeals court on Tuesday ruled against several nonprofit groups that had $16 billion in climate grants frozen this year by the Trump administration.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that it did not have jurisdiction in the case and that the Trump administration acted legally in its attempts to claw back the funds, dashing the environmental groups’ hopes of immediately accessing money they were awarded more than a year ago.
“While some grantees may be forced to shutter their operations during the litigation, their harms do not outweigh the interests of the government and the public in the proper stewardship of billions of taxpayer dollars,” the court wrote in the majority opinion.
Remember the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022? That was Joe Biden’s mega-bill which contained a lot of green spending including a new plan for a bank known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund aka the Green Bank. The purpose of the bank was to dole out federal money to green nonprofits.
The program, approved under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is formally known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, but is more commonly called the green bank. Two initiatives, worth $14 billion and $6 billion respectively, are intended to offer competitive grants to nonprofits, community development banks and other groups for projects with a focus on disadvantaged communities…
Republicans in Congress have called the green bank a “slush fund” and voiced concern over how the money will be used and whether there will be sufficient accountability and transparency.
But shortly after President Trump took office this year, there was a new sheriff in town at the EPA. Lee Zeldin quickly announced he was freezing those funds. In this video from Feb., Zeldin references an effort to toss “gold bars off the Titanic.”
🚨The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of “gold bars off the Titanic”.
BIG UPDATE! We found the gold bars and they are now being recovered for you, the hardworking American taxpayer.
Here are more of the details: pic.twitter.com/DM4C0TQcpj
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 13, 2025
His references goes back to this Project Veritas clip from December 2024 in which an EPA special advisor was caught on hidden camera saying that line about efforts to put money into the hands of green groups before Biden left office.
BREAKING: @EPA Advisor Admits ‘Insurance Policy’ Against Trump is Funneling Billions to Climate Organizations, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars off the Titanic”
“It was an insurance policy against Trump winning.”
“Get the money out as fast as possible before they [Trump… pic.twitter.com/eaAihuNvAh
— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) December 3, 2024
In March, a month after Zeldin froze those funds, he announced the Trump EPA was terminating the grants completely. Again, he made the announcement with a brief video.
Meanwhile, the groups who thought this was money in the bank sued the administration demanding the money back.
Maryland-based Climate United Fund said the EPA and Citibank illegally denied the group access to $7 billion awarded last year through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a Biden administration program created in 2022 by the Inflation Reduction Act and more commonly known as the ‘green bank.’ The freeze threatens the group’s ability to issue loans and even pay employees, Climate United said.
Two other nonprofits, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, have also sued Citibank in recent days, alleging that the bank improperly froze an additional $7 billion to finance climate-friendly projects for housing, low-cost electricity, clean air and water.
So there was a showdown in the courts and the green groups won the first round. In May a federal court sided with them and said the Trump administration had to give them access to the funds. The ruling was seen as a big loss for the Trump administration at the time.
A federal judge says some nonprofits awarded billions for a so-called green bank to finance clean energy and climate-friendly projects cannot have their contracts scrapped and must have access to some of the frozen money. The ruling is a defeat for President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, which argues the program is rife with financial mismanagement.
The order late Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan “gives us a chance to breathe after the EPA unlawfully — and without due process — terminated our awards and blocked access to funds that were appropriated by Congress and legally obligated,” said Climate United CEO Beth Bafford.
The EPA issues what sounded like a pretty standard statement that they were confident their appeal would succeed, but in this case we now know that was right.
Molly Vaseliou, the EPA’s associate administrator for public affairs, contended that the court lacked the power to reinstate the money. She did not provide any new evidence and repeated unsubstantiated allegations of program abuse and conflicts of interest.
“We couldn’t be more confident in the merits of our appeal,” she said in a statement.
The judge who wrote the majority opinion yesterday basically found that neither she nor the lower court were the correct venue for this case.
U.S. Circuit Judge Neomi Rao, writing for the majority, said that because the grant recipients’ case was essentially contractual in nature, the case largely belonged not before Chutkan but a specialist court that hears monetary claims against the government, the Court of Federal Claims.
While Chutkan did have jurisdiction to hear a claim that the EPA violated the U.S. Constitution by not abiding by Congress’ funding decisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, Rao said the agency did no such thing, as nothing in the law limited Zeldin’s discretion to withhold or terminate grants.
The groups that were going to receive these retracted funds haven’t decided what to do next.
Climate United CEO Beth Bafford said in a statement Tuesday, “This is not the end of our road,” and added, “While we are disappointed by the panel’s decision, we stand firm on the merits of our case: EPA unlawfully froze and terminated funds that were legally obligated and disbursed.”
The ruling will not take immediate effect, giving the nonprofits time to consider further appeals. For now, though, the decision stands as a high-profile win for the Trump administration’s EPA and a stinging blow to the climate groups that have been fighting to preserve the program.
We’ll have to wait and see if they decide to keep fighting. In the meantime, the loss of this money probably means layoffs of all the people they hired to administer all of this money. What a shame.
Editor’s Note: Leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump’s agenda to make America great again.
Help us hold these corrupt judges accountable for their unconstitutional rulings. Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
