One Year After Lee Zeldin Blocked GHG Reduction Fund As "Criminal", DC Appeals Shreds Trump Lawyers In Arguments
One year ago today, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he was terminating the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, one of the biggest climate initiatives of the Biden administration, after weeks of alleging the $20 billion in grants had been awarded in a “criminal” scheme. But the Trump administration never was able to show the federal courts evidence of wrongdoing with regards to the fund, which Congress created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to spur private investment in clean energy and climate solutions.
Now, the chaos and accusations of those early months of President Donald Trump’s second term are at center stage in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. After an unusual hearing before 10 of the 11 judges last month (Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson is not participating in the case), the court is weighing what next steps are available for the grantees that have been frozen out of their accounts for the past year.
The D.C. Circuit, widely viewed as second only to the Supreme Court in judicial branch importance because of its role in hearing federal agency cases, questioned the Trump administration’s lawyer harshly. Dominated by Democratic appointees, the court seemed inclined to rule in favor of the grantees. But it is not clear that a favorable ruling will be enough to revive the nation’s first national “green bank.” The Trump administration is poised to continue to press a multi-pronged strategy to defend its right to terminate the slew of contractual agreements that established the program.
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Romany Webb, deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, found the exchange a telling window into the scope of presidential power the Trump administration is asserting. “The plaintiffs in this case, Climate United and the other grantees, have always said that there is nothing here to justify that termination,” Webb noted. “The government attorney was sort of admitting that, saying, ‘Oh, well, we’ll deal with that when we get to claims court.’ I do think that was much more in-your-face than we’ve seen in previous hearings.” If the government can cancel such legal agreements without cause and without recourse for the grantees, it has implications beyond the grantees themselves, Webb explained. She and her colleagues at the Sabin Center represent two groups of urban leaders, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, who have intervened in the case on behalf of the grantees.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11032026/epa-greenhouse-gas-reduction-fund-court-case/