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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Appeals court questions EPA's termination of $20B climate grants
A panel of appellate judges on Monday appeared skeptical of EPA's reasons for terminating $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants, but it indicated the dispute could end up in a different court. During over two hours of oral arguments, the three judges questioned the timing and authority of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's termination of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants, which were intended to support climate and affordable housing projects using funds from Democrats' climate law. 'The facts here are not great for the government,' said Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, pointing to EPA's abrupt termination of the grants in March, on the eve of an initial hearing in a recipient's lawsuit and while the agency was still in the midst of its own fact-finding probe. The panel's other two members, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both of whom were named to the bench by President Donald Trump in his first term, expressed more skepticism about allowing recipients to spend money while litigation plays out. 'If the money were to go out, and then the government were to ultimately prevail, the government would be out of these billions of dollars,' Rao said while trying to determine what is in the public interest. But Katsas and Rao also had hard questions for EPA, including over its concession that it has made no specific allegations of wrongdoing by the recipients themselves. 'What is your claimed basis for termination on the theory that there's no breach, there's no waste, fraud or abuse — but there's a contract structure that might facilitate that?' asked Katsas. 'I'm not sure I see that in the grant agreement.' Yaakov Roth, acting assistant attorney general for EPA's civil division, replied that EPA can cite "structural risk of waste and abuse" rather than specific instances. EPA and the grant recipients have been fighting over the funds for over two months. Things came to a head in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia last month, when Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee, ruled that EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and that the recipients should be able to access their funds. The groups have at least $625 million in transfer requests pending, though that number has likely risen since it was disclosed in mid-April. The legal fight will decide the future of one of the Biden administration's signature climate achievements, and one that Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act structured to be obligated before Trump could return to power. The Trump administration has plowed ahead with canceling these and around 800 other smaller grants nonetheless. House Republicans included a repeal of the GGRF authority in their reconciliation bill that passed out of committee last week, but it has not yet cleared the House or gone before the Senate. Although EPA argues its terminations were lawful, its primary legal argument is that the terminations can only be challenged as a breach of contract, which under a federal law called the Tucker Act would have to be heard by a specialized tribunal, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. 'We have a dispute over whether the contract has been terminated consistent with the terms,' said Roth. 'If we're right about that, they get nothing. If they're right about that, they get damages. And we're not disputing that. But that has to be a different court.' Chutkan disagreed and held she had jurisdiction, and EPA immediately appealed to the D.C. Circuit. Earlier this month, Katsas and Rao ruled that terminated grants from the U.S. Agency for Global Media to several radio outlets were contract claims that must go before the Court of Federal Claims. Pillard dissented in those cases, and the full D.C. Circuit subsequently stayed their ruling. The two judges made similar statements during Monday's arguments over EPA's actions. Rao argued the case was "a dispute about who has title" to the money — the recipients or EPA. "Why isn't that a contract question that should go to the Court of Federal Claims?" she asked. Adam Unikowsky, an attorney at Jenner & Block representing the grant recipients, replied that the groups believe EPA has a "security interest" but that otherwise "it's our money, and we're seeking to vindicate our property interest in that money." But Katsas also indicated he was struggling to see the difference. "I'm not sure the line between contract and property matters," he said. 'We're talking about the Tucker Act and contract claims, and it doesn't really matter whether the government's obligation is to pay money out of the treasury, which triggers all sorts of other issues, or whether it's just any old contract obligation. If it's a contract claim, it's a contract claim.' Pillard offered the hardest questions for EPA, noting the Trump administration asked for a one-day extension of the initial hearing in the case, during which time Zeldin terminated the grants "with zero substantiation that any fraudulent activity is occurring." She also noted EPA did not wait until the deadline for the grant recipients to respond to questionnaires the agency sent about their activities. Roth said the litigation over the freeze and EPA's decision to terminate the grants quickly "were two completely separate processes that were playing out at the same time." In fact, he added, the very need for EPA to send a questionnaire to the recipients "really confirms the problem with the way these grants are structured, because they should not need to do that. They should have that information available to them." But Pillard appeared unconvinced, later telling the grant recipients she felt they were on 'fairly solid ground' in their theory that EPA really terminated the grants as a 'pretextual' reason to shutter a program the Trump administration simply didn't like. She also pushed back on EPA's assertions that the structure of the GGRF program was suspect. The Biden administration set up the grant programs in this way so that the recipient groups could leverage private funds and expand the impact of the spending, Pillard argued. "I mean, if there's something illegal about that model, we should know. But I don't see anything to that effect, and I don't see after how many months actually any evidence of the structural problems that the government purported to rely on here." Roth responded that it could be set up so that the money could be used that way, but EPA would have "additional rights in terms of being able to approve the expenditures to sub-grantees and sub-sub-grantees." Criminal investigations into Biden officials' actions in setting up the program and distributing the funds has not found any "meaningful evidence" of wrongdoing, The New York Times reported Friday. The launching of that probe back in February prompted the resignation of a senior prosecutor who disagreed there was sufficient basis. Zeldin has long argued that Biden officials had guided the funds to former employers or groups connected to powerful Democrats. But the officials and recipients say appropriate ethical safeguards were in place to prevent self-dealing. The Times' report was not raised at Monday's argument. If EPA should lose before the D.C. Circuit, Zeldin made it clear last week that he will appeal. 'The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land, so if a district court judge makes a decision, we are not going to assume that the United States Supreme Court is going to agree with that district court,' he said at a Senate appropriations hearing.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Specifics Matter
Agency shakeups: In the first Cabinet meeting of the new administration, President Donald Trump announced that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Lee Zeldin will be cutting 65 percent of his agency's workforce, or almost 10,000 jobs. "Hours later, an E.P.A. official said Mr. Trump was referring to overall agency budget cuts and not a 65 percent reduction in personnel," reports The New York Times. Trump and co. should get their stories straight and be consistent, but a massive headcount reduction at the agency will probably be necessary regardless. "After recently identifying $20 billion fraudulent in spending, Administrator Zeldin is committed to eliminating 65% of the EPA's wasteful spending," says White House spokesman Taylor Rogers. "The $20 billion Rogers referred to is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, for which the Biden administration placed $20 billion in grants to be administered by nonprofit groups in Citibank," adds Politico. "EPA has not identified any fraud under the program but is trying to get the money back from Citibank." The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund has become something of a controversy (though calling it "fraudulent" is probably not accurate). The massive grant, doled out as former President Joe Biden was winding down his time in office, was supposed to fund clean energy and transportation projects in poorer communities. That $20 billion cited is a chunk of the slightly larger $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). (You might be wondering, "What does this have to do with reducing inflation?" Absolutely nothing, of course. Thanks, Biden. In that sense, all unrelated things authorized by the IRA are fraudulent, I suppose, deliberately branded as something they're not.) Anyway, the grant was basically given to financial institutions, which doled it out to nonprofits who would give home retrofitting grants to individual homeowners (among other things). Certain amounts were earmarked for rural areas and tribal nations. It all seems like something that shouldn't be in the government's purview. Now, Zeldin has vowed to get this money back, to end the contracts and rescind the grants. But the administration has done this in a maximally aggressive way, and senators are chafing at the methods, saying that this money was legally appropriated by Congress and that circumventing that process is wrong. For example, "Trump administration officials had instructed Denise Cheung, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's office, to start a criminal probe of the funding in an effort to claw back the money that is currently held by Citibank, which holds a financial agency agreement with the Treasury," reports Reuters. But Cheung resigned from the U.S. Attorney's office last week over this very issue, saying the administration made an improper demand. This whole saga feels like the second-term Trump administration in a nutshell: Identifying a legitimately bad use of taxpayer dollars; publicizing how insane it is; wrongly flouting separation of powers as a means of attempting to get that money back; Democrats getting next-level apoplectic at them for the methods, seemingly unable to concede the foolishness of the spending in the first place; rinse and repeat. DOGE and the software licenses: "Agencies often have more software licenses than employees, and the licenses are often idle (i.e. paid for, but not installed on any computer)," writes the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on its X account, implying this is some sort of significant cost-savings. "For example, at GSA [General Services Administration], with 13,000 employees, there are: 37,000 WinZip licenses; 19,000 training software subscriptions (and multiple parallel training software platforms); 7,500 project management software seats for a division with 5,500 employees; 3 different ticketing systems running in parallel. Fixes are actively in work." But this misunderstands a few things about how software licensing works: Customers buying software licenses, across all sectors, frequently get volume discounts, so 5,000 seats can be gotten more cheaply in many cases than, say, 4,578 seats; you can use a higher employee count to get into a different (and better) pricing tier. For federal employees in particular, duplicate licenses are frequently required due to using classified networks vs. unclassified ones. There's also flux in headcount (seasonal workers, interns, etc.), so agencies see fit to overbuy. In other words, Elon Musk is fixating on something that probably isn't a real example of government waste. More importantly, the aggressive slashing of these licenses will probably provide a disincentive for private companies to secure government contracts, which means more government-built software vs. contracting it out to the private sector. (I can think of no scarier concept.) Though the execution may be stupid, maybe DOGE is more symbolic than anything else: "I have just informed the purchasing department that they should no longer purchase paper clips. All of us receive documents every day with paper clips on them. If we save these paper clips, not only will we have enough for our own use, but we will also, in a short time, be awash in the little critters," reads the original 1985 memo to employees from Bear Stearns CEO Alan "Ace" Greenberg. "This action may seem a little petty, but anything we can do to make our people conscious of expenses is worthwhile.…Bear Stearns is probably going to sell stock to the public, and there is one guarantee that I would like to give the potential buyers of our stock—they are going to get the fairest shake from us that management can give any public shareholder." Obviously, neither Greenberg nor Bear Stearns are with us any longer; the whole sordid tale of the investment bank's collapse isn't worth getting into. Maybe it undermines the analogy. Or maybe there's an important message that federal employees ought to heed: The government is no longer immune from consequences when it wastes taxpayer dollars. Still, the specifics really do matter. Maybe you could make the case that DOGE's primary value is gotten via slashing headcount, but firing is expensive; short-term costs will necessarily be incurred, possibly for long-term gain. But can that long-term gain be reaped if the next administration simply works to rehire and rebuild the gutted federal bureaucracy? If Musk and team were more deliberate about what's worth cutting and what's worth keeping, we might be in a better spot. But so far, they're directionally correct yet terribly sloppy. Pivot to…? Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, appears to have finally read what his own paper has been publishing. Anyway, he clearly didn't love what he saw. He issued a memo to the staff making clear that the opinion section will be repurposed to only publish pieces in favor of "personal liberties and free markets." Articles that fail to support those views will not be published. "There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views," Bezos said. "Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America's success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity." The existing opinion editor, when presented with this new mandate, hilariously stepped down; the spot's now vacant, but I must say, free markets don't appear to have a lot of supporters within the journalism industry. I wish him luck in his endeavor. Columbia University and Barnard College students are still hot for Hamas. "President Donald Trump said Wednesday the United States will end the Biden administration's concessions aimed at promoting free elections in Venezuela, canceling a license that allowed U.S. oil company Chevron to produce and export oil in the country," reports Politico. "Trump said in a social media post the conditions the Biden administration reached with Venezuela in 2022 that allowed the country to export oil 'have not been met by the Maduro regime.'" This will go into effect March 1. "Nvidia Corp., the chipmaker at the center of an AI spending boom, delivered good-but-not-great quarterly numbers on Wednesday, drawing a muted response from investors accustomed to blowout results," reports Bloomberg. Trump, who may be pursuing a weakening of the U.S. dollar, has a lot of levers he could pull to get there. "He could drive up the value of a foreign currency by ordering the Treasury Department to buy more of it, for instance," writes Patricia Cohen for The New York Times. "Or he could pressure other nations to revalue their own currencies or buy more American goods by threatening to impose tariffs on their imports." Excellent answer: Axios correspondent Alex Thompson has done a good job reporting on Biden's cognitive decline (and the mass cover-up from administration insiders and the complicit mainstream media). Journalist Jake Tapper was very much part of the problem, however: "U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday paused a federal judge's order requiring President Donald Trump's administration to pay foreign aid funds to contractors and grant recipients for past work," reports Reuters. RIP Gene Hackman, star of The French Connection, The Conversation, The Royal Tenenbaums, Bonnie and Clyde, and many others. The 95-year-old was found dead at home, oddly with both his 64-year-old wife and dog dead as well, though authorities don't suspect foul play (?). I think this line, from this piece, sums Hackman up well: "In his performances, as in life, the good guys aren't always nice guys, and the villains have charm." (Also, today I learned the famous car chase scene in The French Connection was filmed illegally, without all the proper permits from the New York Police Department. Incredible.) The post The Specifics Matter appeared first on
