Seven billion dollars. That's what a single outfit called Climate United was set to receive from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund — one award, to one organization, from a program that handed out $20 billion total in the final stretch of Biden's presidency.
The Trump administration froze every penny of it. And the people who signed those checks are watching the case head toward the Supreme Court.
The grants came through the Inflation Reduction Act's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's team flagged as deeply problematic during review. The money was rushed out the door in Biden's final months, awarded to politically connected organizations with what Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, called "a taxpayer-funded slush fund for its climate agenda."
"The Biden administration rushed $20 billion in taxpayer money into the hands of politically connected organizations," Isaac told ZeroHedge. That's not an editorial characterization. That's a CEO whose institute tracks energy policy for a living, describing what the paper trail shows.
The EPA moved to cancel the grants in March 2025. The recipients sued and on August 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 6-4 to keep the freeze in place. Six judges looked at the program and said the administration had standing to pull the plug. Four disagreed. The freeze holds through at least November 9, and the Trump administration is now preparing to take the fight to the Supreme Court.
Travis Fisher, Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, framed the deeper problem: "Resource-neutral permitting reform is superior to subsidies and grants because it advances energy projects without the government picking winners and losers." That's a polite way of saying the entire grant structure was designed to funnel taxpayer money to organizations the government liked, for reasons the government approved, with oversight the government skipped.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act went further — Congress repealed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund provision entirely. The program that created these grants no longer exists in law. The grants themselves are ghosts of a program that Congress killed because it looked exactly like what the critics said it was.
Climate United's $7 billion award sits frozen alongside the rest. One organization. Seven billion dollars. From a fund that was supposed to reduce greenhouse gases but somehow managed to distribute its entire $20 billion allocation to a curated list of recipients before anyone could ask too many questions about who they were or what they'd actually do with the money.
The D.C. Circuit ruled 6-4. Congress repealed the program. The Supreme Court may be next. Twenty billion dollars, and the only people who don't think it was a slush fund are the ones who were in line to cash the checks.