Here is a sequence of events worth sitting with. On September 14, the Environmental Protection Agency signed the final repeal of carbon pollution standards for fossil fuel power plants, an action the agency said would drive down the cost of utilities for American families. Four days later, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the same agency broke the law when it killed a $7 billion program whose only job was cutting electric bills for low-income households.
U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy vacated the EPA's August 2025 termination of Solar for All, a Biden-era grant program designed to bring rooftop and community solar to more than 900,000 lower-income households across every state, Puerto Rico, and tribal lands. Her reasoning was almost boringly simple, which is what makes it so damaging for the administration. Congress appropriated the money in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The grants were awarded in 2024 to 60 recipients: 49 state-level programs, six tribal awards, and five multistate programs. When President Trump's signature tax and spending law passed in July 2025, it cut off the program's future funding but left more than $3 billion in place for the necessary expenses of administering grants that were already obligated. Congress, McElroy wrote, clearly intended those awarded grants to keep flowing. The EPA terminated them anyway, and she found no statutory authority for that anywhere.
The administration's public posture has been contempt. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the program a "boondoggle" when he canceled it. After the ruling, agency spokesperson Carolyn Holran said Solar for All "perfectly encapsulates the previous administration's spending habits: throwing money out the door with minimal oversight or regard for efficacy." The EPA says it is reviewing the decision and considering an appeal.
Set the rhetoric against what the program actually was. Participating households were guaranteed at least 20 percent savings on their electricity bills, with the EPA projecting roughly $350 million in annual savings nationwide and about 4 gigawatts of new solar capacity. At least 25 states and territories were going to get their first-ever low-income solar programs. For a family spending a punishing share of its income just keeping the lights on, a 20 percent bill cut is real money every single month.
And the timing of all this could hardly be worse for the households involved. Electricity prices rose roughly 7 percent through December 2025, more than double the overall inflation rate, according to Goldman Sachs analysts, who expect consumer electricity inflation to run around 6 percent through 2027. Utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases last year. A big driver of the squeeze is the AI data center boom, with the major tech hyperscalers projected to pour hundreds of billions into power-hungry buildouts. Goldman's analysts noted that lower-income households absorb the hardest hit because electricity eats a larger share of their budgets. In other words, the families Solar for All was built for are precisely the families getting squeezed hardest right now.
Because the EPA pulled the plug before money ever reached the states, the damage so far has been measured in stalled projects rather than finished ones. In Boston, an affordable housing nonprofit serving veterans had planned solar installations on 17 multifamily buildings. It scraped together enough state grants and tax credits to finish six. The other eleven sit undone. In Georgia, residents who entered a drawing for free solar installations simply stopped hearing back. Multiply that across 60 grantees and you get a picture of what a termination order does on the ground.
Now for the part of this story that breaks the usual script. The lead plaintiff in the Rhode Island case was not an environmental group. It was the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, a labor federation, joined by the Rhode Island Center for Justice and the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors. "If and when the program does get up and running, there will be thousands and thousands of union jobs created across the United States," federation president Patrick Crowley said after the ruling. "We were proud to be the lead plaintiff." Program designs included workforce training; Maine's award alone was slated to train up to 700 residents for electrical and construction work. Clean energy politics is usually drawn as tree huggers versus hard hats. Here, the hard hats filed the lawsuit, because they read the program as what it also was: a construction jobs program.
One more detail worth knowing before anyone dismisses this as a partisan ruling. McElroy was first nominated to the bench by Barack Obama and then appointed by Donald Trump. She is nobody's idea of a resistance judge, and she still found the termination unlawful.
This case also fits a pattern that is starting to look expensive for the administration. Solar for All was one slice of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The other $20 billion, meant for community lenders financing everything from home efficiency upgrades to cooling centers, was canceled too. Last month, a divided federal appeals court ruled that termination was improper as well. A separate suit brought by more than a dozen state attorneys general over the solar money was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds in June and is on appeal, and related claims for lost funds are pending in the Court of Federal Claims. The courts keep reaching variations of the same conclusion: Congress appropriates, agencies administer, and a new administration cannot simply pocket-veto programs it dislikes.
What happens next matters more than what happened Friday. The EPA is weighing an appeal, and no money is flowing to states yet. The agency could ask a higher court to pause McElroy's order, which would leave 900,000 households in limbo while electricity bills keep climbing. Or it could comply, restart the 60 grant programs, and let states begin enrolling families. Either way, the administration now has to defend, in court and in public, a position that is genuinely awkward: that a program cutting poor families' power bills by 20 percent was a boondoggle, while deregulating power plants was affordability policy.
Free Game Takeaway
If you or someone in your family qualifies as low-income, this ruling is worth tracking concretely rather than abstractly. Solar for All was structured to guarantee at least 20 percent off participants' electric bills, and the 60 grant programs were run through state energy offices, tribal governments, and nonprofits. The money has not started flowing again: the EPA is considering an appeal and could seek to pause the ruling, so watch for two things in the coming weeks. First, whether the agency appeals or asks an appeals court to stay the order, which would freeze everything. Second, whether your state energy office announces a restart of its Solar for All enrollment. Meanwhile, the bigger lesson applies regardless of the lawsuit's outcome: with electricity inflation running near triple the overall rate and utilities requesting record rate hikes, bill relief is becoming contested ground. Check what your state already offers, since many states layered their own low-income solar and efficiency programs on top of the federal one, and those state-level programs never went away. For anyone working in the trades or workforce development, the AFL-CIO's role here is the tell: if this program survives appeal, it funds thousands of installation, electrical, and construction jobs, and state workforce boards are where those training slots will appear first.