Trump wants to roll back $7 billion in grants for solar projects in low-income communities
The Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of drafting termination letters to the 60 state agencies, nonprofit groups, and Native American tribes awarded the funding through the Solar for All initiative, part of the Biden administration's landmark 2022 climate law.
The agency said Tuesday it has not made a final decision about the grants.
Environmental groups say if Trump does go through with the cancellation, the effort will face legal challenges.
Wiping away the grants would halt many projects before they were complete.
The first Solar for All projects, efforts to install residential solar and battery storage systems for tribal communities in Montana and South Dakota, went online in October 2024.
'One in five households on reservations lack access to electricity, and this program was an opportunity to close that gap,' Cody Two Bears, the chief executive of Indigenized Energy, told The New York Times, which first reported on the cancellation effort. 'But those were just two kickoff projects to show what was coming for the next five years.'
Critics of the Trump administration and climate experts said cancelling the grants, which were projected to serve about 900,000 people, would be bad public policy that hurts low-income families and the climate.
'Solar for All is laser focused on helping nearly a million low-income families afford electricity at a time when their bills keep going up,' Zealan Hoover, the EPA's former director of implementation, told The Washington Post. 'If the Trump administration is serious about energy abundance and affordability, then they should be working hard to accelerate — not terminate — these grants.'
'Solar for All means lower utility bills, many thousands of good-paying jobs and real action to address the existential threat of climate change,' Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who championed the program, said in a statement on Tuesday. 'At a time when working families are getting crushed by skyrocketing energy costs and the planet is literally burning, sabotaging this program isn't just wrong — it's absolutely insane.'
In March, the EPA said it was terminating a separate pot of $20 billion in climate funding, prompting a legal challenge.
In April, a federal judge issued an injunction siding with grant recipients.
The administration's One, Big Beautiful Bill spending package, signed in July, repealed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the single largest portion of climate money under the Biden law, and ordered any unassigned funds back to the U.S. Treasury.
There is an ongoing legal battle between grantees and the federal government over the fate of much of the IRA's climate funding. Grantees say much of the funds were legally obligated before Trump took office and immune from presidential action, while the administration claims it claw the funds back.
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