Colorado will try to claw back $600 million in Trump-canceled clean energy grants in a new lawsuit, joining California and other states claiming cancellation of the funds violates both constitutional separation of powers and bans on political retribution.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said at a new conference Wednesday that Congress had already appropriated and directed federal agencies to spend the major research grants, including $300 million to Colorado State University to better control oil well methane leaks that contribute to climate change. Other lost Colorado grants include a $32 million carbon capture and sequestration hub project at Pueblo by the Colorado School of Mines, and $8 million in University of Colorado research into more efficient solar energy, Weiser said.
When CSU representatives asked federal Energy Department officials why the grants were canceled, they were not given a reason, Weiser said. It’s the definition of unlawful “arbitrary and capricious” decisions to keep funding red-state research, yet deny the same funding to blue states just because of how its citizens voted, Weiser said.
The Trump administration has attacked Biden-era clean energy research and development as “the green scam,” Weiser noted.
“The only scam here is that the administration is acting in such a lawless way,” Weiser said, during an online news conference with California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Colorado, California and Washington are the leading AG offices in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. They are joined by other blue-voting states that lost energy grants including Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
Trump signaled his assault on the “green new scam” immediately on taking office in 2025, Weiser’s office said. That was the beginning of “the administration’s illegal objective of eliminating energy and infrastructure programs created under Congress’s authority in laws such as the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act,” the office said.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought turned up the heat with a message on the social media platform X in September, during the budget shutdown, going after “the Left’s climate agenda,” Weiser’s office said, in a timeline accompanying the lawsuit. “The post listed 16 Democratically led states where projects would be defunded. The department officially announced the cuts the next day,” the timeline said.
Joining Wednesday’s action was the 54th lawsuit against the Trump administration that Weiser’s office has either led or joined, Weiser said. The “return on investment” from the lawsuits is already astronomical, Weiser and Bonta said. Colorado added $600,000 to the AG’s budget to pursue federal lawsuits to claw back crucial funds, Weiser said, resulting in over $1 billion in restored or protected Colorado funding.
“This executive branch seems to think they have the power of the purse, that they get to decide what’s funded. That’s not how our constitution works,” Weiser said Wednesday. “This administration might start asking before they take action, is this legal, but if they won’t, we’re going to court, and we’re winning again and again and again.”
Colorado is committed to a clean energy future, Weiser said, and the projects that Trump is trying to defund are exactly “what we need to do,” he said.