On Tuesday, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the Trump administration to proceed with its unilateral termination of roughly $20 billion in congressionally appropriated grants awarded to nonprofits to fight climate change. A district court had previously blocked the cuts, concluding they likely violated the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. But in Climate United Fund v. Citibank, two Trump-appointed federal judges determined that it wasn’t their place to say whether the terminations are legal or not. Because the nonprofits’ claims are “essentially contractual,” wrote Judge Neomi Rao, joined by Judge Gregory Katsas, the nonprofits would have to bring their lawsuits in the Court of Federal Claims instead.

This standard appeared in a dissent that Justice Samuel Alito wrote six months ago. Since then, it has gone on a seemingly implausible journey, reappearing in two Supreme Court shadow docket orders before finally arriving at the D.C. Circuit as, apparently, governing law. By canceling the grants, the Trump administration is again seizing powers that the Constitution never gave it in order to shape all government functions around the president’s prerogatives. The D.C. Circuit’s decision in Climate United Fund v. Citibank shows how conservative judges are constructing a pseudolegal shelter for these brazenly illegal acts.

As a result, it seems, unless and until grantees win some kind of relief in the Court of Federal Claims, the Trump administration can keep frustrating the will of Congress—and sabotaging important work to reduce the risks of climate change.

The grants at issue in this case stem from the Inflation Reduction Act, a federal law passed in 2022 that authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to provide financing and technical assistance for certain climate and clean energy projects. The EPA began distributing the funds last year, but in January 2025, President Donald Trump appointed a new EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin. In early February, Zeldin derided the grants as “criminal” and a “scheme” by the “Biden EPA,” and directed the Department of Justice to investigate. A couple of weeks later, veteran federal prosecutor Denise Cheung was forced to resign by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., because she refused his directions to open criminal investigations and freeze grantees’ bank accounts. (The administration found someone they could bully into freezing the funds some time after that.)