Federal Judge Unfreezes Climate Grant Money Trump Tried to Seize

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily ordered the Trump administration to turn the climate grant funding spigots back on nationwide, at least while lawsuits over frozen funds are pending.

The decision is the latest in a series of wins notched by states and private organizations that sued the White House to force the release of funds issued under the 2021 infrastructure law and 2022 climate law.

It also comes as a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration’s quest to claw back funds, which in many cases it says have been handed out to unqualified recipients under dubious circumstances.

In the case, six nonprofit groups convinced the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island that the Trump administration’s sudden and indefinite freeze of already-awarded money was arbitrary and capricious.

Judge Mary S. McElroy also accepted their claims that the freeze was “neither reasonable nor reasonably explained,” and that the broad powers asserted by the Office of Management and Budget, the National Economic Council, and five federal entities—including the EPA, Department of Interior, and Department of Energy—"are nowhere to be found in federal law.”

The agencies likely have “narrower powers related to individualized funding pauses and terminations, but in cases of vast economic and political significance—like this one—the Supreme Court has urged lower courts to be skeptical of agencies’ sweeping claims of power,” McElroy wrote.

Further, the court found that the nonprofit plaintiffs proved irreparable harm and that the public interest weighs heavily in their favor.

“The court wants to be crystal clear: elections have consequences and the president is entitled to enact his agenda,” McElroy wrote.

But federal courts have no choice but to weigh in on cases about the procedure, or lack thereof, that the government follows in enacting those policies, she wrote.

“Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a president’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration,” according to the ruling.

McElroy expressed sympathy for the grant recipients, who she said experienced “a combination of confusion and silence” when their funding was suddenly turned off.

She also said a nationwide injunction is appropriate because “it would be anathema to reasonable jurisprudence that only the named nonprofits should be protected from the irreparable harms of the likely unlawful agency actions.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that directed agencies to freeze funds under those two laws.

“The well documented incidents of misconduct, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud raise significant concerns and pose unacceptable risk,” Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in March.

The six nonprofit litigants are the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, Eastern Rhode Island Conservation District, Childhood Lead Action Project, Codman Square Neighborhood Development Corp., Green Infrastructure Center, and National Council of Nonprofits.

The case is Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric., D.R.I., No. 1:25-cv-00097, decision 4/15/25.