A federal district court judge blocked the Environmental Protection Agency's efforts to claw back $20 billion the Biden administration awarded to eight climate nonprofit organizations.
In her opinion Tuesday evening, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was appointed by former president Barack Obama, wrote that the Trump EPA failed to submit evidence to support its termination of the billion-dollar grants. Chutkan's ruling, however, does not force federal disbursements to continue to grant recipients, allowing the funds to remain frozen.
The ruling is a temporary block on EPA's termination of the grants and may be reversed pending further court proceedings.
"EPA Defendants vaguely reference 'multiple ongoing investigations' into 'programmatic waste, fraud, and abuse and conflicts of interest' but offer no specific information about such investigations, factual support for the decision, or an individualized explanation for each plaintiff. This is insufficient," Chutkan wrote. "At this stage, EPA Defendants have not provided the 'credible evidence' required."
The ruling represents the latest setback to President Donald Trump's agenda—cutting large Biden-era spending programs and curbing climate programs have both been at the forefront of Trump's agenda. Federal judges have handed the Trump administration a number of setbacks in recent weeks, sparking Trump and top White House adviser Elon Musk to call for the impeachment of certain judges.
The case relates to the Biden administration's handling of the so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. In April 2024, the EPA announced it had selected eight recipients to receive $20 billion under the program and use that money to bolster green energy efforts nationwide. The program, as designed by the Biden EPA, functions as a "green bank," using a pass-through mechanism to support local climate projects.
Shortly after taking office, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin's team discovered that Biden officials parked the $20 billion at an outside financial institution—Citibank. The first-of-its-kind arrangement limits oversight of the funds and creates barriers for the Trump administration's efforts to claw the funding back.
The Washington Free Beacon then reported that one of the eight recipients of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants was a brand new nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. That group, Power Forward Communities, received $2 billion to replace gas-powered appliances with electric alternatives in low-income communities nationwide after reporting just $100 in revenue in 2023.
The Free Beacon also reported that Jahi Wise, the former director of the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund office, oversaw a $5 billion grant to the Coalition for Green Capital, where he served as policy director before joining the Biden administration.
The Department of Justice opened an investigation into how the program funding was disbursed in late February and the EPA requested its inspector general's office to conduct its own audit of the program, citing the Free Beacon's reporting. Last week, Zeldin informed all eight recipients that it had terminated the grants.
But three of the groups—Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities—sued and asked Chutkan to intervene, arguing that they relied on the funding to sustain their operations and that the EPA had violated the terms of the grants.
"While the Biden EPA touted 'tossing gold bars off the Titanic,' these terminated grants, riddled with self-dealing and wasteful spending, are now frozen by court order," Zeldin said in a statement. "The Biden EPA handed politically connected and inexperienced nongovernmental organizations tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funding in a manner that deliberately reduced the ability of EPA to conduct proper oversight."
"I will not rest until these hard-earned taxpayer dollars are returned to the U.S. Treasury," he added. "Every penny EPA spends will go towards our core mission of protecting human health and the environment."