Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Here’s where things stand after some major recent decisions.
The new climate politics are all about affordability.
On the third anniversary of the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, Heatmap contributor Advait Arun mourns what’s been lost — but more importantly, charts a path toward what comes next.
The $7 billion program had been the only part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund not targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.
When Congress rescinded unobligated funds from the historic climate law, it inadvertently answered a question climate advocates have been asking for months.
The Biden administration left office without ever disclosing how much of the historic climate funding from the Inflation Reduction Act it had spent.
Politico reached out to every federal agency in November in an attempt to answer that question and could only conclude that it was a “big mystery.” The administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants created by the IRA, the outlet found, but the amount that had been obligated — meaning legally committed and therefore, at least in theory, protected — remained largely unknown.
That continued to be true right up until the legislative process for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. In addition to overhauling the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, Republicans in Congress rescinded the unobligated funds from 47 of the law’s more than 80 climate and environmental programs. According to scores from the Congressional Budget Office, $31.7 billion of the $93.4 billion for those programs, or about 34%, was left.
That means the Biden administration spent or contracted out about two-thirds of the funding from these programs. The data puts into focus what the ultimate effects and outcomes of the Inflation Reduction Act will be over the coming decades — or rather, what they could be, if the Trump administration upholds existing contracts. Whether the administration must honor these agreements is the subject of several ongoing lawsuits.
But we can see, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the largest appropriation from the IRA of any agency, obligated the vast majority of that money to states, tribes, nonprofits, and other beneficiaries. Billions of dollars to monitor and address air pollution in low-income communities and at schools, to phase down planet-warming refrigerants and transition to next-generation technologies, and to help states build out and implement their climate action plans should theoretically be flowing into the economy, so long as the contracts are ultimately honored. The entirety of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was obligated, and while the EPA has attempted to claw back roughly $20 billion of that — a process that has been held up in the courts — the $7 billion set aside for a low-income solar program called Solar For All is actively funding new projects around the country.
The agency under Biden was less successful in standing up a series of programs designed to advance greenhouse gas emissions reporting. Initiatives to improve the labeling systems for low-carbon construction materials and to standardize corporate emissions reporting never really got off the ground.
The Department of Agriculture was also an efficient spender. While the data shows it had obligated only about $7 billion of the more than $18 billion allocated for climate-focused conservation programs, only $10 billion of the funding was actually available for the department to use by the time Biden left office. On the one hand, that means it awarded 70% of the available funds. On the other, that means Congress has now evaporated a whopping $11 billion that could have been disbursed.
The Forest Service, which is under the USDA, also deployed more than $2 billion, or about 93% of its funding for National Forest restoration, urban forestry, and climate mitigation grants for private forest owners.
There are limitations to the data. It shows that the Department of Energy only spent about 39% of its funding, but because the Budget Office did not break out the rescissions by program, we can’t see how far along the agency got with each one, or how much of each was clawed back. The data can also be somewhat misleading, as several of the programs provide loans and loan guarantees, while the OBBB only rescinded “credit subsidies,” i.e. money to cover the costs of this lending service. In other words, this doesn’t tell us much about how much Biden’s Loan Programs Office accomplished. But in this case the office’s website helps fill out the picture: It lists 23 active loans that were made after the IRA passed, worth nearly $58 billion. (The IRA appropriated about $11.7 billion in credit subsidies to the Loan Programs Office.)
I also put together a list of programs that Congress did not rescind, as they show which IRA creations the GOP either deemed worthwhile or too depleted, a.k.a. obligated, to be worth the effort. Several big-ticket items jump out. As I’ve previously written, two rebate programs for home efficiency improvements remain intact, although most of the $8.8 billion in funding is currently paused. Drought mitigation, water access, and tribal electrification and climate resilience grants were also untouched. A $3 billion EPA program to reduce air pollution at ports made it through the gambit after an initial House draft of the OBBB had proposed killing it.
Republicans in Congress also preserved a nearly $10 billion program to help rural electric cooperatives invest in clean energy and energy efficiency. Rural coops disproportionately rely on coal-fired power plants, burdening their members with higher energy prices and dirtier air. While the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is a major advocate for coal power and has applauded Trump’s moves to boost it, the group also championed the rural clean energy program, with its CEO telling E&E News last fall that the program was oversubscribed and that “there is an appetite for investing in clean energy.”
To be sure, the question of whether and to what extent the Trump administration will disburse previously obligated funds or continue to spend down the remaining programs is a big one. But the supposition that the OBBB “killed” the IRA is also not really accurate. Between obligated funds and the programs that weren’t rescinded, more than $105 billion could still flow into the economy to fight climate change.
The saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund takes another turn.
On July 3, just after the House voted to send the reconciliation bill to Trump’s desk, a lawyer for the Department of Justice swiftly sent a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Once Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, the letter said, the group of nonprofits suing the government for canceling the biggest clean energy program in the country’s history would no longer have a case.
It was the latest salvo in the saga of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, former President Joe Biden’s green bank program, which current Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has made the target of his “gold bar” scandal. At stake is nearly $20 billion to fight climate change.
Congress created the program as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. It authorized Biden’s EPA to award that $20 billion to a handful of nonprofits that would then offer low-cost loans to individuals and organizations for solar installations, building efficiency upgrades, and other efforts to reduce emissions. The agency announced the recipients last summer, before its September deadline to get the funds out.
Then Trump took office and ordered his agency heads to pause and review all funding for Inflation Reduction Act programs.
In early March, buoyed by a covert video of a former EPA employee making an unfortunate and widely misunderstood comparison of the effort to award the funding to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, Zeldin notified the recipients that he was terminating their grant agreements. He cited “substantial concerns” regarding “program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities.”
In court proceedings over the decision, the government has yet to cite any specific acts of fraud, waste, or abuse that justified the termination — a fact that the initial judge overseeing the case pointed out in mid-April when she ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the EPA from canceling the grants. But the EPA quickly appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, which stayed the lower court’s injunction. The money remains frozen at Citibank, which had been overseeing its disbursement, as the parties await the appeals court’s decision.
As all of this was playing out, Congress wrote and passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The new law rescinds the “unobligated” funding — money that hasn’t yet been spent or contracted out — from nearly 50 Inflation Reduction Act programs, including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. According to an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, the remaining balance in the fund was just $19 million.
The Trump administration, however, is arguing in court that the OBBBA doesn’t just recoup that $19 million, but also the billions in awards at issue in the lawsuit. Congress has rescinded “the appropriated funds that plaintiffs sought to reinstate through this action,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov Roth wrote in his July 3 letter, implying that the awards were no longer officially “obligated” and that all of the money would have to be returned. Therefore, “it is more clear than ever that the district court’s preliminary injunction must be reversed,” he wrote.
Roth cited a statement that Shelley Moore Capito, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, made on the floor of the Senate in June. She said she agreed with Zeldin’s decision to cancel the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, and that it was Congress’ intent to rescind the funds that “had been obligated but were subsequently de-obligated” — about $17 billion in total. She did not acknowledge that Zeldin’s decision was being actively litigated in court.
On Monday, attorneys for the plaintiffs fired back with a message to the court that the reconciliation bill does not, in fact, change anything about the case. They argued that the EPA broke the law by canceling the grants, and that the OBBBA can’t retroactively absolve the agency. They also served up a conflicting statement that Capito made about the fund to Politico in November. “We’re not gonna go claw back money,” she said. “That’s a ridiculous thought.”
Capito’s colleague Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, offered additional evidence on the floor of the Senate Wednesday. He cited the Congressional Budget Office’s score of the repeal of the program of $19 million, noting that it was the amount “EPA had remaining to oversee the program” and that “at no point in our discussions with the majority, directly or in our several conversations with the Parliamentarian, was this score disputed.” Whitehouse also called up a previous statement made by Republican Representative Morgan Griffith, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, during a markup of the bill. “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,” Griffith said.
Regardless, it will be up to the D.C. Circuit Court as to whether the lower court’s injunction was warranted. If it agrees, the nonprofit awardees may still, in fact, be able to get the money flowing for clean energy projects.
“Wishful thinking on the part of DOJ does not moot the ongoing litigation,” Whitehouse said.
