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?
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, or 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 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 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 $27 billion.
The money was put into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, 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 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 Office of Management and Budget 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 forGreen Capital, joined EPA as a senior adviser. In July 2023, the EPA published a request for proposals from applicants to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.