Congressional Democrats are urging a federal appeals court to rule that the Trump administration illegally suspended nearly $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants.
EPA can’t yank back money that has already been congressionally appropriated, 8 senators and 32 House members wrote in a friend of the court brief filed Monday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
“At its heart, this is a case about whether the executive branch can freeze and confiscate lawfully made funding awards,” said the brief, led by Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “If so, then perhaps no one in the United States is safe from such unchecked arbitrary action.”
The filing comes as the D.C. Circuit has taken the rare step of agreeing to reconsider a prior ruling that found EPA could terminate the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) grants, which were part of a sprawling Biden-era program to provide low-interest loans for renewable energy projects in low-income communities.
