A second federal court sets aside the Solar for All termination, four days after the first and on different grounds

On 22 September 2026, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia set aside the Environmental Protection Agency's determination that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act had made continued operation of the $7 billion Solar for All programme legally impermissible. The agency's action was, in the court's words, "arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and in excess of statutory authority". The suit was brought by Harris County, Texas and the Texas Solar for All Coalition, and what the court set aside was the agency-wide policy determination, not merely the plaintiffs' own awards.

Four days earlier, Judge Mary McElroy of the District of Rhode Island had vacated the same termination on a narrower theory: that Congress intended the agency to keep administering grants it had already obligated, and that terminating them exceeded its statutory authority under the Administrative Procedure Act. That case was brought for the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, the Rhode Island Center for Justice, Solar United Neighbors and others.

Two courts, two reasonings, one outcome. The EPA cancelled the grants in August 2025. They had been obligated to recipients serving, by the programme's own design, more than 900,000 lower-income households over five years. Harris County's coalition award is reported at nearly $250 million, with more than $54 million to the county itself.

The reason this belongs here rather than only in a litigation roundup is what Solar for All was structured to do. It is the largest American attempt to put generation on roofs that cannot finance it, and into community projects where a household holds a share rather than a bill. Rooftop solar is not principally an emissions technology at this point in the cost curve; it is an ownership technology, and the households it has not reached are the ones for whom the capital cost, not the payback, is the binding constraint. A programme that hands that capital to a household or a community organisation rather than to a utility is a transfer of an asset from the centre to the edge, which is the test this publication applies. A programme that does not disburse is not a transfer of anything.

And that is the part neither ruling establishes. A vacated termination restores a legal position. It does not restore a payment schedule, a signed contract with an installer, a warehouse of modules, or the staff a grantee laid off during thirteen months of cancellation. The operative event for somebody in the fifth ward of Houston is an installed panel and a lower bill, and no source consulted here states that any money has moved since 18 September. The agency that tried twice to end the programme is the agency that would have to run it.

There is a second-order point worth naming, because it is the recurring weakness of decentralization delivered by central grant. The ownership Solar for All creates is genuinely distributed: the panel is on a house, the community project is held by a community. The mechanism that creates it is entirely centralised, discretionary, and revocable by an executive agency between elections. That is not a reason to prefer no programme. It is a reason to notice that the distributed end state has been contingent for thirteen months on the outcome of two lawsuits in two district courts, brought by a county government and a state labour federation, and that the contingency is not obviously over.

What would settle it is dull and checkable: docket numbers, whether the agency appeals, and a disbursement figure by month. None of those are in the reporting yet.