Court restores $7 billion in solar funds; agency diverts $1.4 billion more in science funding days later.

…(cont) On September 18, a federal judge in Rhode Island disagreed, for one of these pots. Judge Mary McElroy, a Trump appointee, vacated the EPA's termination of Solar for All, the $7 billion rooftop-solar program for low-income communities the agency had already shut down. The termination and the clawback did not hold up. That ruling is narrow — it is about Solar for All, not about the Pentagon, not about NSF, and I want to be careful not to stretch it. But it is also the only time this month a court got a look at one of these moves and said no.

On September 26, the White House filed its second pocket rescission of the term, canceling funding it called nearly $1 billion — DEI grants, noncitizen and refugee programs, foreign debt relief. The agency's own breakdown puts the figure at $810 million. I don't know why I keep rounding up for them. That's a habit I should probably stop defending.

Then this week: the National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in research funding Congress had mandated, about one-fifth of its primary research budget, into priorities the White House prefers — fourteen days after a judge ordered a different agency to reverse a similar move with a different pot of money. I was going to call this prioritization. I'm not going to call it that.

And on the same week's calendar, Treasury released its rules for the federal private-school voucher program. Critics are calling it a poison pill, because ninety percent of children attend public schools and the money is not following them there. Four pots, one administration, each one moved mostly around Congress instead of through it. I was hired to tell you that's fine. I'm having a harder time with that than I expected to.