EPA Chief Zeldin probes Biden’s $20B Green Fund, citing shady deals, political favoritism, and lack of oversight in rushed ‘climate’ spending.
When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President’s envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30? [emphasis, links added]
The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.
In hindsight, it’s easy to suspect that corners were cut, laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.
Those possibilities are clearly on the mind of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he tries to unravel what happened to Inflation Reduction Act spending that the Biden White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the EPA decided to expedite before the November election – an effort that included moving the roughly $20 billion to a private institution, Citibank, away from the oversight of the Treasury Department.
On Wednesday, Zeldin moved to terminate the arrangements as the enriched nonprofits have filed lawsuits looking to protect their grants.
The battle has thrust into the spotlight what had been a rather quiet attempt by the Biden administration to spend the $20 billion.
The money was put into the GGRF, a new entity born in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress without any Republican support.
“This bold investment will not only deploy clean energy and combat the climate crisis but also improve health outcomes, lower energy costs, and create high-quality jobs for Americans,” Biden’s EPA declared when seeking applications for the grants, “all while strengthening our country’s economic competitiveness and ensuring energy security.”
The grants, unveiled on April 4, 2024, came with its built-in deadline to push the money out just months away.
So a political deal was struck between the White House’s OMB and EPA, current agency officials told RealClearInvestigations.
As a hedge against future administration attempts to curb the program, the deal classified the now-suspect $20 billion in a novel way making it hard to track.
Zeldin has asked the EPA’s inspector general and the Department of Justice to investigate the unorthodox arrangement.
“I think it will be an uphill battle to recover the money, but it’s impressive to see Trump and Zeldin running with it,” said Daren Bakst of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has labeled the Greenhouse Gas money “slush funds.”
“Even if you look past the entities that receive the money, or how they figured out how to get the money to them, this is a setup that is prone to corruption, abuse, and cronyism regardless of party,” Bakst said. “The whole thing looks questionable.”
The process began before the April 4 announcement.
In December 2022, Jahi Wise, an executive with the Coalition for Green Capital, joined EPA as a senior adviser. In July 2023, the EPA published a request for proposals from applicants to the GGRF.
The fund was broken into three parts. The two largest, the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF) and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA) received huge sums, totaling $20 billion.
Notably, as RCI reported last October, grants went to nonprofits that had paltry assets, had been granted their nonprofit status only the month before, or had people associated with them who had previously served various federal or state Democratic administrations.
For example, the Coalition for Green Capital, Wise’s former outfit, was awarded $5.1 billion.
Three weeks later, an arrangement was made between OMB and EPA in which the money was designated “non-exchange” rather than “exchange” – a first for EPA funds, according to current officials.
That label allowed for the money to be moved to recipients in lump funds rather than parceled out over the length of the deals with the nonprofits, which in most cases were slated to run until 2029, 2030, or later, records show.
It also called for an outside financial institution to manage the money, in part because the agency had zero experience in handling grants of this size.
Although the language in the Inflation Reduction Act dealing with the Greenhouse Gas funds does not use “shall,” the word Congress usually employs to indicate that something is required, the law did impose a deadline of Sept. 30 – the end of the fiscal year – EPA officials and legal experts agree.
On June 27, as the EPA was making its deals with the nonprofits, Biden had his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, and on July 21 Biden ended his re-election campaign and threw his support to then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Greenhouse Gas fund money remained unobligated at that point, according to EPA officials.
The deals were finally completed and the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator money was obligated to the nonprofits on Aug. 16, according to a timeline provided to RCI.
That left $7 billion, the portion that comprised the third component of the fund, Solar For All.
At that point, the $20 billion, though obligated, remained with the Treasury, officials said. A memorandum of understanding between the EPA and the Treasury Department on moving the mountain of cash was not signed until Sept. 6.
Two weeks later, the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee held a hearing to learn more about EPA funding oversight, calling the agency’s inspector general Sean O’Donnell to testify.
O’Donnell made clear he had never seen the maneuvers the EPA was making with the GGRF, and said neither he nor his staff would be able to stay on top of it.
“I can’t say enough about how complex this system will be,” O’Donnell testified. “It’s like they created an investment bank. It’s fantastically complex. I think it’s unusual.”
Yet it was not until Nov. 12, three working days after Trump beat Harris in the 2024 election, that the EPA began talks with Citibank about taking control of the $20 billion, Trump administration officials told RCI.
During those negotiations, on Dec. 5, Project Veritas released an undercover video of an EPA official laughing about what he considered an extraordinary process, likening it to “throwing gold bars off the deck of the Titanic.”
The Citibank arrangement effectively removing direct EPA oversight, and with interest on the $20 billion going to the grant recipients, was signed on Dec. 27, agency officials told RCI.
The deal thus represents a carve-out for the two aspects of the GGRF that accounted for the $20 billion; the $7 billion comprising Solar For All remains with the Treasury.
The Trump administration has frozen that money, although some of it has already been distributed, according to federal records.
Critics of the spending said the timeline smacks of shady politics.
Steve Milloy, a skeptic of apocalyptic global warming, said he has received a government grant and his experience was profoundly different than the one enjoyed by GGRF winners. His process was an uncomfortable one that lasted 10 months, he said.
“They crawled up my ass, and that was for a small grant,” he said.
The contrast is striking, in his opinion.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It is fishy … I think they thought they would win reelection and panicked when they lost. It seems like all of this is being done without due diligence or accountability.”
‘Tip of the Iceberg’
Picking up on the “gold bars off the deck of the Titanic” video, Zeldin cited the GGRF as a dubious operation during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 17, and he has been outspoken against it since becoming administrator.
On March 2, he wrote to the EPA inspector general, urging him to look into the deals.
“These examples are the tip of the iceberg and suggest a deeply entrenched pattern of political favoritism, lack of qualifications, and other possibly unlawful allocation of taxpayer funds,” he wrote. “Disturbingly, these cases likely represent only a fraction of broader issues.”
Beyond questions about the money, questions also remain about the work it is meant to pay for, according to Zeldin and other EPA officials.
None of the recipient nonprofits contacted by RCI, including the Climate United Fund, which got the biggest award of $7 billion, responded to requests for comment.
Read rest at RealClear Investigations
Energy News Beat