Senate Democrats led by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse argued in a Friday letter that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin doesn’t have the authority to end the Solar for All program.
The program from the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund provided $7 billion for low-income solar programs. Zeldin last week announced that the Trump administration would cancel the program in accordance with Republican’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rescinded funds from the GGRF.
But Whitehouse, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and 30 other lawmakers argue in the letter that the Republican megabill only ordered the clawing back of unspent GGRF funds, not already obligated funds like Solar for All and other GGRF programs. That would make the clawing back of already obligated funding illegal, the Democrats say.
“Despite these baseless attacks, the bottom line is that neither [the Congressional Budget Office] nor Republicans understood the repeal and rescission of the GGRF to save anything more than EPA’s unspent oversight dollars,” the senators wrote in the letter. “Wishful statutory interpretation on the part of EPA does not enable EPA to cancel lawfully obligated grants.”
