Vermont joined a lawsuit directed at the Trump administration on Wednesday for abruptly cutting $7 billion in federal funding for nationwide solar energy projects.
The complaint joins together a coalition of 20 states from Arizona to Maine, including Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark. The complaint, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, targets the Environmental Protection Agency’s cancellation of the Solar for All program under EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
The state was first notified that their grant would be terminated in a letter from the agency on Aug. 7. The next day, Zeldin posted a video that said his agency “no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive.” He called Solar for All a “grift,” with 15% of programmatic costs going toward “middle men taking their own cut.”
A week later, on Aug. 13, the EPA suspended Vermont’s account, which included more than $62 million in federal funds. By Sept. 19, the account was “liquidated,” and more than 90% of the funds were drained, according to the attorney general’s office.
The program was designed to pass on solar benefits to more than 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal office that administered the grant to 49 states and six tribes, among others.
“In keeping with a longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on pending litigation,” the agency’s press office said in an email Thursday.
The White House declined to comment.
The program was part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, $27 billion that aimed to reduce carbon emissions and was repealed under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill on July 4. The Solar for All page on the Environmental Protection Agency’s website has since been replaced with a quote from Zeldin that claims cutting federal programs would reduce “frivolous” spending “in the name of ‘climate equity.’”
Vermont’s congressional delegation championed the initiative, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who introduced Solar for All into the Inflation Reduction Act. The 2022 act, under the Biden administration, channeled hundreds of billions of dollars toward the clean energy transition. Much of those programs have since been defunded by the Trump administration.
“I introduced the Solar for All program to slash electric bills for working families by up to 80% — putting money back in the pockets of ordinary Americans, not fossil fuel billionaires,” Sanders said in the attorney general’s Thursday press release. “Donald Trump wants to illegally kill this program to protect the obscene profits of his friends in the oil and gas industry.”
Last year, Vermont received $62.5 million from the federal program through the Vermont Department of Public Service. Funds were temporarily frozen in February, but in May, Vermont had allocated more than $22 million of the state’s total grant to help install solar panels on low-income housing through the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, a quasi-public entity that acts like a bank for affordable housing.
At that point, the state had spent roughly $150,000 on staffing that was billed to the agency on a month-by-month reimbursement basis, Melissa Bailey, director of the state energy office within the Vermont Department of Public Service, previously said.
Kerrick Johnson, the department’s commissioner, said he hoped the funding for the program could be restored.
“Thousands of Vermonters stand to benefit if we can get this done,” Johnson wrote in an email.
The state expected to serve about 8,300 low-income households, reduce electric bills by at least 20% and create about 300 new jobs, according to the release.
In May, Sanders said that Trump’s budget bill that canceled the program could not legally rescind the funds.
“Vermont has an agreement with the EPA for this money, and the Trump Administration cannot go back on this deal,” Clark said in the release.
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