By Kennedy Maize
Two Federal courts have upended more of the nefarious acts of the Trump administration’s energy and environmental policy gurus — Dr. Arbitrary and Capt. Capricious — and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.
Just days apart, federal judges in D.C. and Rhode Island have reversed a move by Environmental Protection Agency Director Lee Zeldin killing the $7 billion, Biden administration’s “Solar for All” (SFA) program aimed it low-income consumers.
The program was part of the Biden administration’s massive, 2022 post-Covid Inflation Reduction Act, including the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The package also included the $7 billion SFA. The fund and the SFA were together an amendment to the Clean Air Act. The EPA had awarded all the act’s funds by September 2024.
In February, Zeldin froze $20 billion of the fund, also known as the “green bank,” that had been awarded to several groups but had not been allocated and was being held by Citibank. Zeldin said the Biden administration’s allocation of the funds before their term ended was like “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
In March, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Zeldin’s move was illegal. She said that Zeldin acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” — the key terms of the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — without evidence supporting a decision to kill the grants and terminate the entire program. The agency also violated the Constitution, specifically the separation of powers.
“At this point,” she ruled, “the record does indicate that EPA seeks to dismantle these grant programs in their entirety as a policy matter.” That’s the job of Congress, not administrative agencies.
Indeed, EPA also separately terminated the awards under the competitive SFA program. The agency argued throughout that the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” was the legal authority for termination the SFA awards.
Last Tuesday (Sept. 22) Judge Chutkan in a separate case brought by one of the SFA grant recipients, Harris County, Texas, again overturned the EPA. The agency’s action in killing that SFA program, she wrote, “is arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and in excess of statutory authority.”
As for the OBBBA, Chutkan did not order EPA to restore the grant to the county. Instead, she said, “Plaintiff does not challenge the termination of its individual grant, and the court has not reviewed it. What the court sets aside is the agency’s policy-level determination that OBBBA rendered continued operation of SFA legally impermissible—applicable to the program as a whole…. EPA may take no further action premised on the ground that OBBBA § 60002 requires or authorizes the program’s termination.”
Four days earlier (Sept. 18) at the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, Judge Mary S. McElroy, in case brought by the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and several other environmental and public interest groups, reached similar conclusions to those of Chutkan. McElroy found that Zeldin and EPA had trampled on the APA.
The administration argued that the passage of the OBBBA turned the SFA awards into “lump-sum amounts without statutory restrictions,” allowing EPA to cancel them. McElroy ruled, “They provide no legal authority for their proposition that the obligated SFA funds were somehow converted into lump-sum amounts untethered to the program for which they were originally appropriated.”
She added, “The more obvious reading of Congress’s intent is that, while grant funding from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was to no longer be available following the OBBBA, already existing grant awards were to remain in place, subject to the residual statutory authority under which they were originally obligated.”
EPA then argued that the case was a simple contractual dispute between the government and the recipients of the initial awards. McElroy wasn’t buying it. She found that “Plaintiffs lack any contractual relationship with Defendants. The sources of the rights upon which they base their claims are the APA and the Constitution, rather than the terms of any grant issued to them by the federal government.”
Alex St. Pierre, vice president for environmental justice at the Conservation Law Foundation commented, “Clean, affordable power like solar shouldn’t be a closed-door luxury. Solar for All was built to open that door, and EPA tried to slam it shut. Today’s ruling pushes it back open. Communities have waited long enough. Nearly every family is looking for ways to cut their energy bill. These dollars should go where Congress intended: toward lower energy bills, less climate pollution, good jobs, and cleaner air.” CLF focuses on New England environmental issues.
Judge Chutkan of the D.C. court, born in Jamaica, was a 2014 Obama appointment to the federal bench. Judge McElroy was originally an Obama nominee in September 2015. The time ran out on her nomination before it could be completed. Trump renominated her and she took office in October 2019.
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