EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Tuesday evening he had terminated $20 billion in climate change grants issued by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act, escalating a legal conflict over whether the Trump administration was encroaching on the authority of Congress.
Zeldin has spent the past month criticizing the spending and contending without evidence the program was rife with fraud. His latest move comes just one day before a federal judge will hold a hearing in a lawsuit brought by one of the grant recipients seeking access to the funds held in a Citibank account that the Trump administration had frozen while it probed the program.
“This termination is based on substantial concerns regarding program integrity, objections to the award process, programmatic fraud, waste and abuse, and misalignment with the agency’s priorities, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the awards,” Zeldin said a video posted online. “The only way we can reduce waste, increase oversight and meet the intent of the law as it was written is by terminating these grants.”
In a letter to the Climate United Fund, which received a $7 billion grant under the program and has taken the agency to court to access that money, EPA said that the termination was “based on substantial concerns” about the structure of the Biden administration’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, which was authorized by Congress in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
