Appropriation of funds for EPA

The administration is seeking to pull back money that is already out the door — cash that President Joe Biden’s agencies had awarded, and placed in accounts for the recipients at Citibank, before Trump took office.

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Trump administration attorneys knew they were on uncertain legal ground as they strategized ways to keep eight nonprofit groups from spending $20 billion in Biden-era climate grants that had already left the federal coffers [...] .

The fight to squash the spending could expose the Trump administration to billions of dollars in damages if a court later finds its actions to be unlawful, one Environmental Protection Agency lawyer warned as part of a series of Sunday night emails last month — less than 48 hours before EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin terminated the grants altogether.

In the same email chain, government lawyers acknowledged that they did not know whether criminal and civil investigations launched by the Trump administration would uncover evidence of the waste, fraud or conflicts of interest that Zeldin has publicly alleged in his frequent attacks on the climate grants. Their “short-term objective” was to block the money while those probes play out, a senior Justice Department attorney wrote in one email.

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The emails, never before made public, offer a rare glimpse at the administration’s internal qualms as EPA, DOJ and Treasury wage one of the most aggressive battles in President Donald Trump’s campaign to throttle his predecessor’s clean energy and climate agenda.

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The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to rule as soon as this week on whether the Trump administration can continue freezing the money, which had been meant to pay for solar power, energy efficiency upgrades and other clean-energy projects in lower-income communities.

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“What I take from [DOJ’s] line is, they’re still trying to find ways to claw back the money, and they want to give themselves as much time as possible to do fishing expeditions to find any evidence in criminal or civil investigations that might give them a plausible reason for arguing that there was fraud going on [...] "

  Politico