The Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to reclaim $20 billion of the Biden administration’s out-the-door climate change grants has been blocked by a federal judge.
District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled in favor of Climate United Fund (granted $6.9 billion), Coalition for Green Capital (granted $5 billion), Opportunity Finance Network (granted $2.8 billion) and others that sued Administrator Lee Zeldin, the EPA and Citibank for withholding the grant money.
Chutkan ordered the disbursement of any and all funds incurred before the EPA’s mid-February suspension. However, the EPA maintains that the D.C. District Court lacks jurisdiction to reinstate the grants.
“These grants are terminated, and the funds belong to the U.S. taxpayer,” an EPA spokesperson told the Epoch Times. “The abuse within these programs run rampant with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, and deliberately limited agency oversight,” they said.
On the other hand, the grant recipients have taken Chutkan’s ruling as a win.
“Today’s decision gives us a chance to breathe after the EPA unlawfully — and without due process — terminated our awards and blocked access to funds that were appropriated by Congress and legally obligated,” CEO Beth Bafford of Climate United Fund said.
When Zeldin first announced his department would halt grant disbursement, he said the money was used “to justify handouts of billions of dollars” to Biden’s “far-left friends.” A Free Press investigation followed the grant money to eight nonprofits, finding that some of them were formed only a few months before receiving the billion-dollar-plus grants.
Energy Secretary Christopher Wright claimed in May that the grants were given based on sparsely written qualifications.
“There were lots of funds that went out the door and commitments that were made from businesses that provided no business plan, no numbers about their own financial solvency or how this project would actually work,” he said.
Chutkan’s latest order unfreezes $14 billion of the $20 billion total.