The tug of war for appropriations is not new. As reported by the Associated Press, the most recent battle is over clean energy funding for Americans. On April 22, 2024, former President Joe Biden announced $7 billion in federal grants for residential solar projects serving 900,000-plus households in low- and middle-income communities as the Solar for All program. The grants were awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the expectation that the funds would eventually reduce emissions by the equivalent of 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and save households $350 million annually. These climate-change-related policies continue to be heavily politically charged.
In July of 2023, the Biden administration announced that $20 billion would be allocated from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, referred to as the “green bank,” funds appropriated by Congress when the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was passed. The $20 billion was dedicated to clean energy projects: residential heat pumps, electric vehicle charging stations, and community cooling centers. On August 7, 2025, however, the EPA terminated the green bank, and eliminated an additional $7 billion for the Solar for All program aimed at funding residential solar projects President Trump's newly appointed EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, stated at the time that “authority for the solar program was eliminated under the tax-and-spending law signed by [President] Trump [in July]”. Packaged as savings for Americans under the Trump administration, the $20 billion and $7 billion recalls thus canceled previously authorized and dedicated public funds for renewable energy projects. Mr. Zeldin was quoted as calling the energy programs a “boondoggle,” and therefore targeted by the Trump administration as evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse, thus emphasizing the stark reversal in course from the Biden-era administration’s endeavors.
Last week, nonprofit legal advocacy groups and other plaintiffs initiated litigation in Rhode Island against the Trump administration’s rollback of $7 billion Solar for All program funding. Different groups have previously initiated suits against the Trump administration for a similar rollback of the $20 billion green bank funding allocation after the EPA froze the accounts of the green bank recipients. A district court subsequently ruled that the EPA could not support Administrator Zeldin’s accusations of wrongdoing, that the nonprofits should not have their contracts terminated, and must have access to certain funding that had been frozen. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the district court and found in a 2-1 majority decision, authored and approved by two first-term Trump administration appointees, that federal officials have broad latitude to cancel funds that have been appropriated by Congress without facing allegations in federal district court that they broke the law. The dissent disagreed, noting what it believed to be “the true loss, the authority of Congress to write policy and maintain its traditional power of the purse, [as established by the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of 1974]”.
Judge Neomi Rao authored the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and urged that the dispute belonged in the federal claims court, considering the contractual nature of the issue. The green bank groups argued that the federal claims court is limited to awarding possible monetary damages. The groups were seeking an order allowing them immediate access to their funds, which total about $16 billion. The green bank groups still have avenues for appeal; however, with the green bank group litigation as a backdrop to last week’s Solar for All court filing, it is clear that suits for the release of Biden-era funds are an uphill battle, as is most, if not all, federal litigation.
