Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is stepping into a national fight over climate finance, urging federal officials to shut down what he calls a $20 billion “climate slush fund” created under President Joe Biden. His push drops directly into an already charged battle over whether that money is a transformative clean energy investment or a reckless use of taxpayer cash with too little oversight.
At stake is a large slice of the federal government’s climate agenda, money that supporters say is designed to mobilize private capital into disadvantaged communities and that critics portray as a parked pile of “gold bars” sitting outside normal budget controls. I see Marshall’s move as the latest test of how far the Trump administration and its allies in the states are willing to go to unwind Biden-era climate policy, even when Congress has already written the underlying program into law.
The Biden-era fund Marshall wants to erase
The program Marshall is targeting traces back to the Inflation Reduction Act, when Congress created a $27 billion pool known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF. Lawmakers specified that $20 billion would flow into national and regional “green bank” entities and that the remaining $7 billion would support a Solar for All initiative, embedding the fund in statute rather than in a discretionary agency program. The Biden team then moved to implement that mandate, with the Biden, Harris Administration Announces using the Environmental Protection Agency to structure $20 Billion in Grants to Mobilize Private Capital and Deliver Clean Energy and Climate Solut in the form of competitive awards to nonprofit lenders and coalitions.
Supporters inside and outside government have framed that $20 billion slice as the largest single pot of climate finance the federal government has ever tried to steer into community-level projects. EPA materials describe the Biden, Harris Administration Announces effort as a way to use those Billion in Grants to Mobilize Private Capital and Deliver Clean Energy and Climate Solut in neighborhoods that have historically struggled to attract investment, particularly for rooftop solar, building retrofits, and small-scale storage. In that telling, the GGRF is not a slush fund at all but a congressionally designed tool to cut emissions while lowering energy costs for low income households.
How the money turned into “gold bars”
That is not how the program looks from the vantage point of the Trump administration now running the EPA, or from Marshall’s office in Montgomery. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is advocating to cancel out a $20 billion climate slush fund approved under the Biden administration, arguing that the structure of the accounts and the speed of the late-term awards left the money vulnerable to misuse. In a social media post amplified by conservative outlets, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall tied his criticism to broader concerns about Biden-era spending and the way climate policy has been layered on top of existing energy markets.
His rhetoric tracks closely with that of EPA administrator Zeldin, who has publicly demanded the return of $20B in taxpayer money wasted by Biden administration decisions and has said his team found $20 billion parked with outside financial intermediaries under reduced oversight before Inauguration Day. In the same narrative, Now, Zeldin has located the gold bars and described the accounts as “shockingly” structured, a phrase that has quickly become shorthand among critics for the idea that the GGRF awards were rushed out the door to lock in Biden’s climate legacy. For Marshall, that framing provides a ready-made justification to call for the entire arrangement to be unwound.
Trump’s EPA freezes the accounts
The political argument has already translated into concrete action inside the federal bureaucracy. Bank accounts for $20B climate program frozen amid Trump administration scrutiny after Zeldin voiced his criticism, with the EPA ordering a halt to most disbursements while lawyers and auditors review the underlying grant agreements. According to reporting on those Bank accounts, Trump officials have treated the freeze as a necessary pause to determine whether the awards complied with both the Inflation Reduction Act and standard federal grant rules.
The freeze has rippled through the network of nonprofit lenders and coalitions that had been gearing up to deploy the money. Much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding that President Trump initially froze via exective order has been unfrozen in accordance with subsequent guidance, but the green bank recipients tied to this $20 billion tranche have not yet been able to access it again. That leaves organizations that were counting on GGRF capital in limbo, even as the EPA $20B funding freeze leaves “green bank” nonprofits warning that projects could stall and staff could be laid off if the review drags on.
Legal and political stakes around the GGRF
Marshall’s intervention raises the stakes of that review by adding a state-level legal challenge to the mix. In his public comments, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has framed the GGRF as a misuse of federal power that distorts energy markets and bypasses traditional appropriations scrutiny, language that could preview arguments in court filings. If he follows through, any lawsuit would have to grapple with the fact that Congress, in 2022, passed the Inflation Reduction Act and established the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, GGRF, explicitly directing EPA to stand up the program rather than leaving it to agency discretion.
On the other side of the ledger, congressional Democrats have already signaled that they view the GGRF as a core part of the Inflation Reduction Act and have pressed the EPA to move quickly to honor existing awards. A letter from Congress has stressed that the Inflation Reduction Act and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, GGRF, were designed to leverage many times more in private investment, particularly in communities that have long faced higher pollution and energy burdens. That political divide means any move by Trump’s EPA to cancel or claw back the grants, especially if spurred by Marshall and other Republican attorneys general, is likely to trigger a fresh round of oversight hearings and potential litigation from grantees.
Communities and developers caught in the crossfire
While the legal and political fight escalates, the most immediate impact is being felt by developers and communities that had lined up projects based on the promised capital. Reporting on the Trump administration stalls $20B in clean energy funding as legal battles mount has quoted one participant saying, Key quote: “It’s actually really scary. A lot of developers could go belly-up over the situation.” That sense of uncertainty is compounded by the Why this matters analysis, which warns that The Green funding pause is imperiling projects nationwide and also undermining national climate targets that depended on rapid deployment of distributed clean energy.
Inside the EPA, officials who helped design the program have defended it as a once in a generation chance to reshape local energy systems. One described the $20 billion program as part of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the largest pot of climate finance ever managed by the agency, and said, “This really is a transformative investment” because it focuses on poor communities that have historically been left out of clean energy booms. That perspective, detailed in accounts of Trump’s EPA wages war over $20B in “gold bars,” underscores how differently the same pool of money can look depending on whether one prioritizes rapid decarbonization or strict limits on federal spending.
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