Last month, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) discovered a $20 billion windfall that the EPA gave to radical green groups in the waning days of the Biden administration. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was a catch-all program designed as a federal money spigot for radical NGOs and green groups.
The $20 billion in cash was doled out to just eight groups, including $2 billion to Power Forward Communities, an organization that, at the time it received the EPA grant in April 2024, had $100 in the bank.
Power Forward Communities lists dozens of “partners” on its website, among them are several organizations created by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. She’s listed as general counsel for another group, Rewiring America.
When DOGE tried to pull the plug on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Power Forward Communities and two other recipients of Biden’s green slush fund, they sued. A judge has temporarily blocked the EPA’s actions in ending the program saying that the EPA has not presented “evidence of fraud.”
The judge is familiar to readers since she handled the Trump election interference case. U.S. District Court Judge Tonya Chutkan wrote that the federal government’s “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient.”
“At this juncture, EPA Defendants have not sufficiently explained why “unilaterally terminating Plaintiffs’ grant awards was a rational precursor to reviewing” the Green Bank program, Chutkan wrote. The “Green Bank” was Citibank, which has frozen the accounts of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction grant recipients.
Chutkan said she was neither forcing the EPA to “undo” its termination nor making the funds unrecoverable, but ensuring that the government abides by grant laws and regulations, “which serves the public interest.”
“The government can’t just void contracts and void agreements and terminate things without following its own regulation,” the judge had said earlier during a court hearing.
The court ruling marks the latest twist in a wild, multibillion-dollar fight the Trump administration has picked over its predecessor’s political legacy. The green bank seeks to leverage public and private dollars to invest in clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps and more, including through community lenders in low-income areas. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin last month alleged that the money was awarded with little oversight and has sought to claw back the money from Citibank, which was tasked with disbursing the funds, triggering an internal EPA inspector general probe and a Justice Department criminal investigation.
“EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed the grant recipients engaged in mismanagement, fraud, and self-dealing in announcing that he froze and moved to terminate the grants,” reports Fox News. Chutkan found those reasons lacking in specificity and “vague.”
It’s very difficult to claw back money already awarded in a grant, no matter how objectionable the cause or the grant recipient. That’s the way the government works. If every president could undo the actions of a previous administration just because they disagreed with what the money was for or who it went to, there would be chaos.
That said, Zeldin’s claims of mismanagement will be difficult to prove.
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