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A federal appeals court has ruled the Trump administration can terminate $16 billion in grants to non-profits for climate-related projects.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit voted 2–1 to reverse U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s injunction preventing the federal government from withholding the funds.
In the case of Climate United Fund v. Citibank, environmentalists sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator, Lee Zeldin, to prevent the cancellation of the grants.
The plaintiffs said they were unlawfully denied access to the funds and that the freeze would make it difficult for them to operate.
The EPA terminated the grants in March due to concerns about oversight and transparency.
The program, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund or “green bank,” was approved under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and saw the EPA award $20 billion in grants to eight groups to launch climate-related projects.
Zeldin described the program as a “gold bar” scheme, and said the cancellation was based on “substantial concerns regarding program integrity, objections to the award process, programmatic fraud, waste and abuse, and misalignment with the agency’s priorities.”
The Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs’ claim should not have been addressed in a federal district court.
The district court lacked jurisdiction, or authority, “to hear claims that the federal government terminated a grant agreement arbitrarily or with impunity,” a judge said.
The district court “abused its discretion in issuing the injunction,” and the grantees are unlikely to win their case on the merits “because their claims are essentially contractual.”
In June, Infowars reported that the Trump administration is taking steps to repeal a key climate policy from the Obama era.
“EPA has sent to the Office of Management and Budget a proposed rule to repeal the 2009 endangerment finding from the Obama EPA,” Zeldin told Newsmax.
That 2009 determination, made under President Obama, found that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane posed a threat to public health. It provided the legal foundation for regulating emissions from vehicles and other sources under the Clean Air Act.
“Through the endangerment finding, there has been into the trillions worth of regulations, including tailpipe emissions and including electric vehicle mandates,” Zeldin said.
While Biden-era vehicle emissions standards didn’t explicitly mandate electric cars, they were expected to significantly shift the market toward them.
The repeal of the endangerment finding could undercut such climate rules.
The move, first reported by The New York Times, signals a major escalation in Trump’s rollback of environmental regulations. Although his first term saw the weakening of emissions limits, the endangerment finding itself remained intact.
The 2009 endangerment finding followed a 2007 Supreme Court ruling requiring the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases threaten public health. That ruling authorized the agency to regulate them if they did.
The current proposal is not yet final. Formal revocation could take months or years, and the agency appears to still be developing its case. A similar recent EPA move argued that power plants’ emissions should not be considered “significant” contributors to dangerous air pollution.
Zeldin, during his confirmation hearing, declined to say whether he believes the EPA has a duty to regulate climate change.
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