Trump administration attorneys knew they were on uncertain legal ground as they strategized ways to keep eight nonprofit groups from spending $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants that had already left the federal coffers, according to internal government emails obtained by POLITICO.
The fight to squash the spending could expose the Trump administration to billions of dollars in damages if a court later finds its actions to be unlawful, an EPA lawyer warned as part of a series of Sunday night emails last month — less than 48 hours before Administrator Lee Zeldin terminated the grants altogether.
In the same email chain, government lawyers acknowledged that they did not know whether criminal and civil investigations launched by the Trump administration would uncover evidence of the waste, fraud or conflicts of interest that Zeldin has publicly alleged in his frequent attacks on the climate grants. Their “short-term objective” was to block the money while those probes play out, a senior Justice Department attorney wrote in one email.
The government’s approach “is believed to have significant legal vulnerabilities,” veteran EPA attorney Jim Payne wrote to 14 career staff and political appointees at the environmental agency, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department late on the night of March 9.
