DAVID BLACKMON: Will Lee Zeldin Be Able To Claw Back $20 Billion In EPA Gold Bars?

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said this week he plans to work with the Department of Justice and the Inspector General’s Office to claw back $20 billion in intermittent energy subsidies shoved out the door in the final weeks of the Biden administration. That was a period of time at EPA that one mid-level management official caught on hidden camera described as the equivalent to gold bars being tossed from the Titanic.

Zeldin referred to that video in a statement he posted on X announcing his attempt to return some of that gold to the U.S. Treasury. “An extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden-EPA political appointeetalking about how they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day,” Zeldin said, adding, “The gold bars were tax dollars, and tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden Administration knew they were wasting it.”

In Zeldin’s view, a big chunk of that waste is represented by a transfer of $20 billion to an account set up at CitiBank, from which huge grants were then transferred to eight entities which will in turn dole out awards to an array of additional non-profits. If it all seems to you to be similar to the kinds of opaque dark money schemes involving NGOs organized as 501(c)(3) “non-profit” groups exposed through DOGE’s review of the USAID budget, you are not alone.

Zeldin certainly finds it all suspicious, alleging that “this scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

The entity receiving the largest piece of the $20 billion pie, a 501(c)(3) called the Climate United Fund describes itself as a “national coalition of experienced non-profit financial institutions investing in solutions that tackle our nation’s toughest economic and environmental challenges” at its website. But the rules for NGOs organized this way limit their obligations to reveal who those other “non-profit financial institutions” are. 

Regardless, this dark money group finds itself in charge of doling out $6.7 billion in taxpayer funds as part of a program the