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The EPA’s $20 billion climate funding controversy explained

Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, claimed in a video posted last week that the agency had found money that had been “parked” at a financial institution during the Biden administration. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

By Claire Brown, New York Times

The fate of $20 billion in federal climate funding that was legally committed months before the election has been thrown into question after a weeklong controversy involving “gold bars,” the right-wing group Project Veritas and two federal agencies.

Now, more than 200 planned investments intended to help finance clean energy and environmental projects in underserved communities may be at risk.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a press release announcing it had found billions of dollars, or what it called “gold bars,” that had been “parked” at a financial institution during the Biden administration.

In a video accompanying the release, Lee Zeldin, the leader of the E.P.A., criticized the Biden administration’s decision to use a private bank to disburse the funds and called for Citibank, the bank in question, to return the money.

The money was “green bank” funding from the E.P.A.’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which received $27 billion under the Biden-era 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Funds were held in Citibank accounts under the names of eight nonprofit grantees, which were planning to send it to other green banks and loan it out for climate projects.

Dept. of Justice resignation

The situation escalated on Tuesday, when Denise Cheung, a top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., abruptly resigned after she refused to open a criminal investigation into an unnamed government vendor and freeze unspent assets. The vendor is believed to be Citibank, and the assets in question are thought to be the $20 billion identified by Zeldin’s team.

Cheung said in a resignation letter that she felt there was not sufficient evidence to restrict the nonprofits’ access to the accounts.

By Thursday, it wasn’t clear whether Citibank would freeze the funds. That has created confusion among grant recipients about whether they’ll have access to the money.

Read the full story here

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Do you know what Elon Musk’s federal job is?

Musk is everywhere. His role is still murky.

*Elon Musk and Donald Trump at a “Victory Rally” in Washington last month. Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times*

By Jess Bidgood, New York Times

Early on in his interview with President Trump and Elon Musk yesterday, Fox News’s Sean Hannity tried ever so gently to get to the bottom of an important question: What does Musk actually do?

“He’s your tech support?” Hannity asked, referring to the words on the T-shirt Musk had opened his blazer to reveal a few moments earlier.

Musk said he was.

“He’s much more than that,” Trump insisted.

The exchange did little to answer the question. Musk’s precise role and responsibilities remain so vague, and so shrouded in secrecy, that even he and the president haven’t quite agreed on what to call it, or exactly how to talk about it.

Trump once said that it would be Musk’s job to “lead” the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but a court filing this week said he was not actually the administrator of that effort — although it did not say who was. The White House has called Musk a “special government employee,” and Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, insisted that the department merely advised agencies, without the authority to fire people.

“He’s more powerful than a cabinet secretary, but he is not Senate-confirmed,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former Republican Senate aide, who added that, at the same time, Musk offers little public information about his day-to-day activities.

The White House has not laid out exactly how many people are part of Musk’s team, or exactly what they are doing. For all of Musk’s promises of transparency, the public is learning about his team’s work largely through reporting and through, as my colleague Zach Montague pointed out today, legal filings. Even judges are having difficulties ascertaining basic facts about the group’s incursion into agencies and the data its staff is collecting.

The vagueness serves Musk in a couple of ways. Downplaying his job — as he did during the Hannity interview — might help wall him off from scrutiny, as Zach wrote. But it could also allow his role, and that of his team, to evolve as he and the president see fit.

After all, the executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency said its purpose was to modernize technology and software. But Musk has spent much of his time focused, at least publicly, on cutting costs. Then, last night, he suggested that his real job was to enforce Trump’s executive orders.

“I feel like they’re making the rules up as they’re going along,” said William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who spent 25 years working on issues related to the budget for Senate Republicans.

Read the full story here

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Trump steps in to block NYC’s congestion pricing

By Jon Campbell and Stephen Nessen, Gothamist, Feb 19, 2025

The Trump administration moved to revoke federal approval for congestion pricing on Wednesday, making good on a campaign promise to kill the tolls that since Jan. 5 have charged drivers a $9 daytime fee to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent Gov. Kathy Hochul a letter announcing his agency would revoke federal approval for the tolls, which were permitted to launch through a Federal Highway Agency pilot program.

“I share the president’s concerns about the impacts to working-class Americans who now have an additional financial burden to account for in their daily lives,” Duffy wrote in the letter.

The move is almost certain to spark a legal battle over the Trump administration’s federal authority and the 2019 state law initiating the tolls. If it holds up in court, the loss of the tolls would also strip more than $15 billion the MTA planned to use for crucial upgrades to the city’s transit system.

Read the full story here

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NJ legislation aims to lessen the hassle of installing solar

By Steven Rodas | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The power of the sun has already meant a lot for New Jersey, but that doesn’t mean harnessing that energy hasn’t been a headache for some.

Without due diligence or because of red tape, attaching solar panels to your roof can take as long as a year in some cases or sometimes never happen at all — due to a logistical misstep in the process.

Lawmakers in the state say they want to change that.

Through a new bill (S4100) which was introduced in early February, New Jersey hopes to join California and Maryland in streamlining the process for towns to advance and approve solar installations by automating much of the permitting.

“I think that doing it on a statewide basis means that everybody is going to have the same process. We’re not going to have loads of different ones,” state Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Middlesex — one of the legislators who sponsored the bill — told NJ Advance Media.

Those “loads of different” processes makes things complicated and costly, according to state Sen. John McKeon, D-Essex, who spearheaded the bill which as of this week has an Assembly version too.

The steps needed to ultimately add solar panels — as part of efforts to better the environment and save on energy costs — can be cumbersome because of everything from contractor permits needed, electrical grid requirements, mandated inspections and more.

According to lawmakers, who cited installers, about 1 in 5 residential solar projects are cancelled after an application is submitted largely as “a direct result of frustration experienced in attempting to maneuver through New Jersey’s permitting process.”

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FEMA is losing hundreds of employees to Trump chops. What are the changes of the next big hurricane hitting Mar A Lago?

By Brianna Sacks, Hannah Natanson and Ruby Mellen, Wash. Post

Hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees were fired as part of a wave of terminations of federal workers over the holiday weekend and Tuesday, according to agency officials. The cuts, which come in addition to the firing of more than 200 last week, target probationary and contract employees and could affect people across the country who are struggling to rebuild and prepare for disasters.

The mass firings started over Presidents’ Day weekend, part of what federal employees in text groups and online forums called the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” which has created chaos across the federal government. Supervisors warned their workers to quickly pull their documents off websites and email them to personal accounts so they’d have copies, messages seen by The Washington Post show. Employees logging into internal systems could no longer see team profiles, which are usually readily accessible.

Read the full story here

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D.C. federal prosecutor, head of criminal division, resigns in protest

By Carol D. Leonnig and Spencer S. Hsu, Washington Post

The head of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. resigned Tuesday morning after declining to comply with a Trump administration demand to freeze the assets of a multibillion-dollar Biden administration environmental grant initiative, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Veteran prosecutor Denise Cheung did not spell out her reasons for her sudden resignation in an emailed announcement to colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post, but she praised her co-workers for their “countless” sacrifices in the service of the public and honest law enforcement.

“This office is a special place,” she wrote. “I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully.”

Cheung’s resignation came in connection with a Justice Department effort to assist President Donald Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who said last week that he would try to rescind $20 billion in grants awarded by the Biden administration for climate and clean energy projects, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly.

Read the full story here

D.C. federal prosecutor, head of criminal division, resigns in protest Read More »

The EPA’s $20 billion climate funding controversy explained

Do you know what Elon Musk’s federal job is?

Musk is everywhere. His role is still murky.

Trump steps in to block NYC’s congestion pricing

NJ legislation aims to lessen the hassle of installing solar

FEMA is losing hundreds of employees to Trump chops. What are the changes of the next big hurricane hitting Mar A Lago?

D.C. federal prosecutor, head of criminal division, resigns in protest

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