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At least for the foreseeable future. But is the Manchin-Barrasso bill actually worth it?
So … is the permitting reform bill any good or not?
Earlier this year, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming proposed a bill that would change federal environmental rules so as to spur a buildout of new energy infrastructure around the country.
Their proposal would have loosened rules for oil and gas drilling and exporting while changing federal law to encourage the construction of more clean energy.
These renewables-friendly changes included creating a new legal regime that would push utilities and grid operators to build significantly more long-distance power lines, triggering a nationwide boost to renewable resources. They would also have changed the regulations governing geothermal power generation, allowing new enhanced geothermal wells to play by the same federal rules that bind oil and gas.
The legislation was announced in July and then … nothing happened.
Now it seems likely to come back. Congress is eyeing its final agenda items for the year, and permitting reform is one of them. Representative Bruce Westerman, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, is currently said to be revamping Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal to include reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock law that guides the process — but not the outcome — of virtually every major decision that the federal government makes and requires it to study the environmental impact of its policies.
We don’t know what those changes will look like yet, though they’ll have to come soon — the new Congress gets sworn in in just a few weeks. Which means lawmakers will have to get the proposed changes, process them, and decide whether to vote for them in a very short period of time — just a few days.
So during this liminal period, then, I wanted to take a moment to look at the other parts of the bill. Earlier this year, we got a sense of what the bill’s quantitative effects might be. They suggest that the legislation — at least in the initial version proposed by Manchin and Barrasso — could very well help cut U.S. emissions, or at least leave them flat. But after that? It starts to get complicated.
Republicans have long pushed for changes to the federal government’s permitting regime.
But in recent years, Democrats — who hope to prompt a national surge of clean energy construction — have come aboard too. The Biden administration, frustrated that some parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law haven’t resulted in the large-scale projects they hoped for, has come to back permitting reform explicitly, although they have not endorsed Manchin and Barrasso’s bill.
“The president has been clear … that we believe permitting reform should pass on a bipartisan basis — and that we believe permitting needs to be optimized for building out a clean energy economy,” John Podesta, a White House senior advisor who is now the country’s top climate diplomat, said in a speech last year.
The White House’s support of bipartisan permitting reform is more than just posturing: Because of Senate math, any changes to the country’s permitting laws almost certainly must be bipartisan. Until a bare majority of Democratic senators exists to kill the legislative filibuster, it will take a vote of at least 60 senators — a so-called supermajority — to alter most pre-existing federal legislation.
So the question, then, is: Is this attempt at permitting reform worth passing? Is this package of fossil fuel concessions and clean energy incentives likely to reduce emissions more than it increases them?
I won’t try to answer that question comprehensively today, and we can’t even answer it fully until we know the scope of Westerman’s changes. But I do want to share an analysis from the center-left think tank Third Way and other researchers that suggests that the answer is “yes.”
This analysis, released in September, argues that Manchin and Barrasso’s bill would modestly increase emissions by encouraging more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But that increase would likely be dwarfed by a large decrease in emissions prompted by building out the country’s electricity transmission grid.
More specifically, it finds that while the pro-fossil fuel provisions could raise global climate pollution by as much as 6.1 billion metric tons by 2050, the bill’s support for transmission could cut emissions by as much as 15.7 billion metric tons in that time (although the final number, as you’ll see, is a very high end estimate). That’s because, as I’ve written before, building the grid will allow for more renewable, geothermal, and other forms of zero-carbon electricity generation to get built. And the country can only reduce emissions by building more zero-carbon electricity.
Some of those emissions increases from oil and gas are now likely to occur whether or not the bill passes — the Trump administration will encourage fossil fuel extraction and export far beyond what a Harris administration would have done.
But even in a more conservative scenario, the transmission provisions would still cut emissions by 6.5 billion metric tons by 2050, Third Way’s synthesis says. That would mean — when compared to the pro-fossil policies — that the bill has a much more modest effect overall, cutting emissions by just over 400 million tons through 2050.
These aren’t the only numbers out there. An analysis by Jeremy Symons, the former vice president of public affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that the bill’s loosening of some Biden-era restrictions on liquified natural gas export terminals will result in a tremendous LNG boom. He asserts that the bill’s LNG provisions could increase global emissions by 8.5 to 11 gigatons; his analysis, however, draws heavily from a controversial, initially erroneous, and now updated study from the Cornell ecologist Robert Howarth that contends American natural gas is far worse for the climate than coal.
Third Way did not include Symons’ study in its analysis. Instead, it cites a different study led by the Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins (with whom I cohost Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast) that uses natural-gas emissions estimates more in line with the broader scholarly literature. That modeling study indicates that the LNG provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill could increase emissions by as much as 3.3 gigatons — or decrease them by 2.4 gigatons.
I’m not going to get more into the LNG question in this story. And it’s somewhat less important than it was earlier this year because Trump administration is likely to approve as many LNG export terminals as it can. (That doesn’t mean those terminals will get built: Right now, a dozen LNG terminals have been approved but not built due to a lack of global demand for more LNG.) Instead, I want to dive into two specific provisions in the bill — on oil and gas leasing and transmission — that reveal the broader challenges of trying to speak concretely about this proposal.
By far the most climate-friendly provisions in EPRA concern its support of long-distance electricity transmission. As I’ve covered before, the lack of electricity transmission is now one of the biggest barriers to building new wind, solar, and other clean energy in the United States; the construction of new wind farms, in particular, seems to be slowing down because of a lack of available power lines to carry their electrons.
Manchin and Barrasso’s proposal aims to build more transmission largely by granting new powers to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the country’s power grids. EPRA would, for instance, allow FERC to step in and approve transmission lines that are “in the national interest” if a state has not acted on a given project within a year. The law also clarifies who should pay for a new power line, encoding the idea that customers who benefit from a line should pay for it. And it lets FERC approve payments from developers to the communities where new transmission infrastructure gets built, potentially smoothing approvals at the local level.
The bill also instructs FERC to write a rule that will require each part of the country to build a minimal amount of power lines that allow regions to exchange power with their neighbors. This measure — meant to spur new “interregional” transmission infrastructure — aims to knit the national grid more closely together and lower power costs on average.
How much would these policies reduce national emissions? The truth is, that’s extremely difficult to model. “There’s nothing in the EPRA that says, Thou shalt build this much transmission,” Charles Teplin, a grid expert at the think tank RMI, told me.
Instead, the bill aims to kick off a process that will result in more transmission getting built. That transmission should — in theory — bring more renewables online. But what will the size of that buildout be, and how many emissions will those renewables displace?
Answering these questions requires, again, estimating the uncertain. To come up with a reasonable, conservative figure to represent the amount of regional transmission that might get built under the new FERC process, they looked at what happened when a similar process was overseen by the Midwest’s grid. Then they rounded down that figure significantly.
Teplin and his colleagues also assumed that some big power lines that have already been proposed nationwide — roughly 15 gigawatts, to be exact — will get completed faster because of these new laws, so their analysis starts to bring them online by 2029. One only need look at the nearly two-decade saga of SunZia, a large power line that crosses New Mexico and Arizona, to see how long it can take to finish those projects today.
Under those assumptions, the law should more than double the rate of America’s transmission buildout, Teplin and his team estimated. Right now, the country builds perhaps 1 gigawatt of new transmission lines every year; under their assumptions, that would leap to 2 to 4 gigawatts a year.
So how many emissions would these new lines avoid? Using a report published by Grid Strategies, a power sector consulting firm that advocates for more transmission, Teplin and his colleagues estimate that each “gigawatt-mile” of new transmission will let operators add about 32 gigawatts of solar and wind to the grid each year. (This suggests that, most of the time, the lines would run at about 30% of capacity.)
Finally, the team assumed that electricity from these new renewable projects will replace power from natural gas plants. That, too, is an approximation: Some of those new wind and solar farms will drive out coal plants; others might replace non-emitting resources like nuclear or hydroelectric dams; but in general they will reduce gas burning.
When you put all those figures together, RMI’s analysis suggests that the legislation could build roughly twice as much new clean energy generation by 2050 as exists in all fossil-fuel power plants today. These new resources would help avoid about 6.5 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century.
That may seem like a big number — but Third Way was actually able to reach an even larger estimate. Teplin and his team didn’t try to differentiate, for instance, between the effects of a recent FERC order, which requires utilities to build more transmission within regions, and the proposed Manchin-Barrasso bill, which shores up the legality of that FERC order and would also induce utilities to build more power lines between regions. Some legal experts argue that the recent FERC order will be on shaky ground if the Manchin-Barrasso bill doesn’t pass; others say it’s stable enough as-is.
If you assume that courts will kill the FERC order unless Congress acts, then that should raise your estimate of what Manchin-Barrasso might do. That’s essentially what Third Way did — by giving the bill more credit for the resulting regional transmission buildout, they say that its carbon upside could be as large as 15.7 gigatons over the next 25 years. I’m not sure I would be that aggressive, but I think the transmission provisions would likely initiate a big buildout of renewables.
The Manchin-Barrasso bill contains a number of provisions that aim to increase the leasing of federal land for oil and gas drilling. One set requires that the Interior Department must offer a minimum amount of acres every year for oil and gas leasing. It also says that the land offered must be land that oil and gas companies actually want to lease.
This would address one of Republicans’ biggest objections to how the Biden administration has handled oil and gas extraction on federally owned land. As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Manchin required that the government offer a minimum amount of oil and gas acreage for every acre of public land it leased to wind and solar developers. But Republicans have accused the Biden administration of getting around this rule by, in essence, offering useless or otherwise undesirable land.
(This concession, I should add, is now essentially moot until 2029, as the Trump administration will hasten to nominate the parcels that oil and gas companies are most excited to drill on. But it could bind a future Democratic administration, requiring them to offer good parcels for oil and gas leasing at the same time that they offer federal land for renewable development.)
The bill would also change some of the rules around the drilling allowed on the borders of federally owned land. Under the Manchin-Barrasso bill, companies could drill a vertical well on privately owned land, then extend it horizontally underground into federal land to extract oil or gas.
These provisions, too, are difficult to model. Much like the transmission proposal, they won’t lead to a guaranteed amount of drilling (although they will essentially produce a minimum amount of fossil fuel leasing). Nor will they substantially change the drilling that happens under Donald Trump or a future Republican president because any fossil fuel-loving administration is already free to go much further than these provisions would require them to.
To estimate the emissions impact of these provisions, the think tank Resources for the Future first tried to draw some error bars around their analysis. As a worst-case scenario, analysts modeled what would happen if the onshore drilling that happened during the Trump administration occurred every year from 2025 to 2050. Under this “Trump forever” scenario, emissions increase about 2.1 gigatons from 2025 to 2050. Under a less dire scenario, they would increase by about 0.6 gigatons during the same period.
These estimates almost certainly exceed what EPRA would actually do, Kevin Rennert, the director of RFF’s federal climate policy initiative, told me.
“None of the provisions would require the levels of leasing that we’re analyzing in the high-leasing scenario,” he said. “It’s clear [that the model is] a high upper bound on what EPRA itself would drive.” The provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso bill, in other words, are aimed much more at putting a floor under a future Democratic administration than they are raising a ceiling for a future Republican administration.
(Over all these discussions hangs a curious question about drilling for oil and gas on public land: How important is it, really? But that’s a question for another time.)
How you feel about this reform effort ultimately depends on how you feel about gambling. Is it worth hamstringing a future Democratic president’s ability to hem in oil production in exchange for unleashing a wave of new transmission under the Trump administration? How much do you weigh building more renewables versus selling more fossil fuels to the world?
Trump’s victory last month also changes the calculus. His administration will increase onshore oil and gas leasing regardless of whether this bill passes or not. He will stop the Energy Department’s effort to slow down the construction of LNG terminals and approve a new wave of projects. All of the bill’s support for fossil fuels, in other words, would be moot — Trump will do that stuff anyway. So the question becomes whether the bill’s support for new transmission infrastructure 1) actually builds new power lines, and 2) provides a useful tailwind for renewables and clean energy during what would otherwise be a difficult four years.
You can go in almost endless loops through the politics here. Given Trump’s antipathy toward renewables, why should we expect his administration to allow a transmission buildout in the first place, regardless of what Congress says? In which case, maybe the bill isn’t worth it. But on the other hand, maybe it is — since Trump’s going to do everything he can to juice fossil fuels and fight renewables, why not pass the bill and give power system regulators in blue and purple states an extra tool to juice clean energy construction? And hey, given Trump’s friendliness toward the AI boom, maybe he’ll wind up having to build more transmission just to service data centers.
We can’t make that political call quite yet. Until we know exactly how Westerman’s addition to the legislation would change NEPA, it’s hard to say where lawmakers should come down. But what’s clear is that this may be Congress’s last chance to deal with permitting reform for a while. Next year, the Republican majority is likely to be focused on tax cuts, and it’s not even clear that the reconciliation process would allow for changing permitting law. “We’re pretty pessimistic that you could include anything on permitting or transmission or any of these other things in the reconciliation process,” Devin Hartman, a policy director at the center-right think tank the R Street Institute, told Heatmap this week.
So this is it for permitting reform — it’s now or never for this set of changes. In a year full of surprises for climate and environmental law, we may yet get one more.
Jael Holzman contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the magnitude of emissions reductions from the Manchin-Barrasso bill found in Third Way’s analysis.
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Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Since July 4, the federal government has escalated its assault on wind development to previously unimaginable heights.
The Trump administration is widening its efforts to restrict wind power, proposing new nationwide land use restrictions and laying what some say is the groundwork for targeting wind facilities under construction or even operation.
Since Trump re-entered the White House, his administration has halted wind energy leasing, stopped approving wind projects on federal land or in federal waters, and blocked wind developers from getting permits for interactions with protected birds, putting operators that harm a bald eagle or endangered hawk at risk of steep federal fines or jail time.
For the most part, however, projects either under construction or already operating have been spared. With a handful of exceptions — the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, the Atlantic Shores development off the coast of New Jersey and the Empire Wind project in the New York Bight — most projects with advanced timelines appeared to be safe.
But that was then. In the past week, a series of Trump administration actions has presented fresh threats to wind developers seeking everyday sign-offs for things that have never before presented a potential problem. Renewables developers and their supporters say the rush of actions is intended to further curtail investment in wind after Congress earlier this summer drastically curtailed tax breaks for wind and solar.
“I don’t think they even care if it’ll stand judicial review,” Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center, told me. “It’s just going to chill anyone with limited capital from going to [an] agency.”
First up: The Transportation Department last Tuesday declared that it would now call for a national 1.2-mile property setback — that is, a mandatory distance requirement — for all wind facilities near railroads and highways.
When it announced the move, the DOT claimed it had “recently discovered” that the Biden administration had “overruled a safety recommendation for dozens of wind energy projects” related to radio frequencies near transportation corridors, suggesting the federal government would soon be stepping in to rectify the purported situation. To try and support this claim, the agency released a pair of Biden-era letters from a DOT spectrum policy office related to Prairie Heritage, a Pattern Energy wind project in Illinois, one recommending action due to radio issues and a subsequent analysis that no longer raised concerns.
Citing these, the DOT stated that political officials had overruled the concerns of safety experts and called on Congress to investigate. It also suggested that “33 projects have been uncovered where the original safety recommendation was rescinded.” DOT couldn’t be reached for comment in time for publication. Pattern Energy declined to comment.
Buried in this announcement was another reveal: DOT said that it would instruct the Federal Aviation Administration to “thoroughly evaluate proposed wind turbines to ensure they do not pose a danger to aviation” — a signal that a once-routine FAA height clearance required for almost every wind turbine could now become a hurdle for the entire sector.
At the same time, the Department of the Interior unveiled a twin set of secretarial orders that went beyond even its edict of just the week before, requiring that all permits for wind and solar go through high-level political screening.
First, also on Tuesday, the department released a mega-order claiming the Biden administration “chose to misapply” the law in approving offshore wind projects and calling on nearly every branch of the agency to review “any regulations, guidance, policies, and practices” related to a host of actions that occur before and after a project receives its final record of decision, including right-of-way authorizations, land use plan amendments and revisions, and environmental and wildlife permit and analyses. Among its many directives, the order instructed Interior staff to prepare a report on fully-approved offshore wind projects that may have impacts on “military readiness.” It also directed the agency’s top lawyer to review all “pending litigation” against a wind or solar project approval and identify cases where the agency could withdraw or rescind it.
Then came Friday. As I scooped for Heatmap, Interior will no longer permit a wind project on federal land if it would produce less energy per acre than a coal, gas, or nuclear facility at the same site. This happens to be a metric where wind typically performs worse than its more conventional counterparts; that being the case, this order could amount to a targeted and de facto ban on wind on federal property.
Taken in sum, it’s difficult not to read this series of orders as a message to the entire wind industry: Avoid the federal government at all costs, if you can help it.
What does the future of wind development look like in the U.S. if you have to work around the feds at every turn? “It’s a good question,” John Hensley, senior vice president for markets and policy analysis at the American Clean Power Association, told me this afternoon. The challenge is that “as we see more and more of these crop up, it becomes more and more difficult to move these projects forward — and, somewhat equally important, it becomes difficult to find the financing to develop these projects.”
“If the financing community is unwilling to take on that risk then the money dries up and these projects have a lower likelihood of happening,” Hensley said, adding: “We haven’t reached the threshold where all activity has ground to a stop, but it certainly has pushed companies to re-evaluate their portfolios and think about where they do have this regulatory risk, and it pushes the financing community to do the same. It’s just putting more barriers in place to move these projects forward.”
Anti-wind activists, meanwhile, see these orders as a map to the anti-renewables Holy Grail: forcibly decommissioning projects that are already in service.
On the same day as the mega-order, the coastal vacation town of Nantucket, Massachusetts, threatened legal action against Vineyard Wind, the offshore wind project that experienced a construction catastrophe during the middle of last year’s high tourist season, sending part of a turbine blade and shards of fiberglass into the waters just offshore. The facility is still partially under construction, but is already sending electrons to the grid. Less than 24 hours later, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative legal group tied to other lawsuits against offshore wind projects, filed a petition to the Interior Department requesting that it reconsider prior permits for Vineyard Wind and halt operations.
David Stevenson, a former Trump adviser who now works with the offshore wind opponent Caesar Rodney Institute, told me he thinks the Interior order laid out a pathway to reconsider approvals. “Many of us who have been plaintiffs in various lawsuits have suggested to the Secretary of the Interior that there are flaws, and the flaws are spelled out in the lawsuits to the permit process.”
Nick Krakoff, a senior attorney with the pro-climate action Conservation Law Foundation, had an identical view to Stevenson’s. “I’m certainly not aware of this ever being done before,” he told me, noting that the Biden administration paused new oil and gas leases but didn’t do a “systematic review” of a sector to find “ways to potentially undo prior permitting decisions.”
Democrats in Congress have finally started speaking up about this. Last week four Democrats — led by Martin Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum arguing that the secretarial orders would delay any decision related to renewable energy in general, “no matter how routine.” A Democratic staffer on the committee, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the letter, told me privately that “fear is where this is headed.”
“They’re just building a record that will ultimately allow them to not approve future projects, and potentially deny projects that have already been approved,” the staffer said. ”They have all these new hoops they have to go through, and if they’re saying these things aren’t in the public interest, it’s not hard to see where they are going.”
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to cancel grants awarded from the $7 billion Solar for All program, the final surviving grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, by the end of this week, The New York Times is reporting. Two sources also told the same to Heatmap.
Solar for All awarded funds to 60 nonprofits, tribes, state energy offices, and municipalities to deliver the benefits of solar energy — namely, utility bill savings — to low-income communities. Some of the programs are focused on rooftop solar, while others are building community solar, which enable residents that don’t own their homes to access cheaper power.
The EPA is drafting termination letters to all 60 grantees, the Times reported. An EPA spokesperson equivocated in response to emailed questions from Heatmap about the fate of the program. “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law,” the person said.
Although Solar for All was one of the programs affected by the Trump administration’s initial freeze on Inflation Reduction Act funding, EPA had resumed processing payments for recipients after a federal judge placed an injunction on the pause. But in mid-March, the EPA Office of the Inspector General announced its intent to audit Solar for All. The results of that audit have not yet been published.
The Solar for All grants are a subset of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, most of which had been designated to set up a series of green lending programs. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin accused the program of fraud, waste, and abuse — the so-called “gold bar” scandal — and attempted to claw back all $20 billion. Recipients of that funding are fighting the termination in an ongoing court case.
State attorneys generals are likely to challenge the Solar for All terminations in court, should they go through, a source familiar with the state programs told me.
All $7 billion under the program has been obligated to grantees, but the money is not yet fully out the door, as recipients must request reimbursements from the EPA as they spend down their grants. Very little has been spent so far, as many grantees opted to use the first year of the five-year program as a planning period.