Whitehouse, Markey, Van Hollen, Dingell Lead 36 Colleagues in Filing Amicus Brief Challenging Trump Administration’s Unconstitutional Clawback of Climate Funds

“At its heart, this is a case about whether the Executive Branch can freeze and confiscate lawfully made funding awards held in private bank accounts without due process because of an Administration’s disagreements with [Congressional] policy decisions,” wrote the lawmakers.

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee; Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Ed Markey (D-MA), and U.S. Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI-06) led 36 Members of Congress in submitting an amicus brief to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sitting en banc in the case of Climate United Fund, et al. v. Citibank, N.A. et al.  The brief urges the Court to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) illegal efforts to eliminate the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator programs, both of which are part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). 

The lawmakers pressed the Court to uphold a temporary injunction against the Trump Administration’s efforts to nullify two congressionally appropriated grant programs by clawing back funds that had been fully awarded and disbursed into private bank accounts. Congress created these programs to capitalize clean energy funds intended to spur economic development, lower energy costs, and reduce pollution. The GGRF, a $27 billion national climate financing fund passed into law as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, has been a frequent target of the Trump Administration’s war on climate safety and low-cost clean energy.

“At every turn, EPA has sought to thwart Congressional intent concerning the GGRF. From day one, the Trump Administration declared war on programs established and funded by the IRA, with a particular venom reserved for two of the GGRF’s catalytic capitalization grant programs, the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator.  In their efforts to eliminate Congressionally mandated grant programs, Administration officials have harassed the award recipients with baseless threats of prosecution and sought to claw back disbursed grant money out of private hands,” explained the lawmakers.

The case centers on the Legislative Branch’s constitutional authority to pass laws that the Executive Branch must faithfully execute.  As the lawmakers made clear, the Trump Administration’s freezing of appropriated funding and attempted clawbacks from private bank accounts violate congressional mandate, writing, “At its heart, this is a case about whether the Executive Branch can freeze and confiscate lawfully made funding awards held in private bank accounts without due process because of an Administration’s disagreements with [Congressional] policy decisions… If so, then perhaps no one in the United States is safe from such unchecked arbitrary action.”

As the lawmakers pointed out, a lower court ruled that EPA aimed to fully dismantle the GGRF and never planned to re-issue the grants, despite the Trump Administration’s claims to the contrary: “The district court concluded as the finder of fact that ‘the record does indicate that EPA seeks to dismantle these grant programs in their entirety as a policy matter,’” and “[a]mong other support, the district court found that EPA: initially claimed fraud and conflicts of interest in the grant process but later abandoned those claims and admitted the terminations were ‘based on reasons of policy’; served Plaintiffs with identical information requests on the GGRF program’s oversight controls, then terminated all the grants prior to receiving responses; and refused to provide any rationale for ‘why it needed to cancel every single grant to review some aspects of the GGRF program…’”

The Trump Administration has failed to meaningfully engage with or provide grounds for reversing the district court’s ruling, laying bare its ongoing efforts to usurp congressional authority: “EPA’s actions to dismantle a Congressionally mandated program are a brazen and impermissible attempt to usurp the Legislative Branch’s power. The Constitution granted the power of the purse to Congress, not the President or his agents. Congress may employ that power ‘to further broad policy objectives,’ and neither the President nor Executive agencies may decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibit spending based on policy differences.”

Despite the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) unambiguous terms rescinding only “unobligated balances,” EPA has falsely claimed that rescissions also apply to obligated funding.  But, as the Senators argued, EPA's claims are inconsistent with the OBBBA’s text and Congressional intent: “Aside from the plain text of the OBBBA, confirmation that the OBBBA did not authorize rescission of already-obligated funds comes from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s budget ‘score’ of the provision. Lawmakers relied on CBO’s ‘score,’ or the estimated cost or savings of each provision, to ensure the reconciliation bill met each Committee’s savings or spending instructions as set by the Budget Committees.”  Furthermore, during the markup of the Energy and Commerce Committee title for the House version of the bill, then-Chair of the Environment Subcommittee Morgan Griffith (VA-09) stated: “‘I just want to point out that these provisions that we are talking about only apply as far, as this bill is concerned, to the unobligated balances. So if a grant was already given, as far as this bill is concerned, then that would still be going forward… [W]e can’t rescind expenditures that have already been obligated.’”

Senators Whitehouse, Van Hollen, and Markey, and Representative Dingell previously led 36 Members of Congress in submitting an amicus brief in the case, in which they pressed the Court to grant rehearing en banc and to overturn the poorly reasoned earlier ruling by a three-judge panel of the Court that would have allowed EPA to proceed with its illegal clawbacks.

Joining Senators Whitehouse, Markey, Van Hollen, and Representative Dingell in signing the amicus brief were Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI), and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ-06), Jim McGovern (D-MA-02), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL-09), Betty McCollum (D-MN-04), Kathy Castor (D-FL-14), Steve Cohen (D-TN-09), Paul Tonko (D-NY-20), Mike Quigley (D-IL-05), Julia Brownley (D-CA-26), Jared Huffman (D-CA-02), Mark Takano (D-CA-39), Don Beyer Jr. (D-VA-08), Ted Lieu (D-CA-36), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ-12), Nanette Barragán (D-CA-44), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL-08), Darren Soto (D-FL-09), Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA-05), Sean Casten (D-IL-06), Madeleine Dean (D-PA-04), Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX-07), Mike Levin (D-CA-49), Troy Carter (D-LA-02), Kevin Mullin (D-CA-15), Brittany Pettersen (D-CO-07), Shri Thanedar (D-MI-13), Jennifer McClellan (D-VA-04), Maxine Dexter (D-OR-03), Sarah Elfreth (D-MD-03), Emily Randall (D-WA-06), and Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ-07).

Full text of the brief is available HERE.