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As President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration approaches, President Joe Biden’s lame duck administration is racing to Trump-proof its green jobs program.

The Biden White House has “quietly been winding down” the American Climate Corps (ACC) — a de facto environmental public works program established via a September 2023 executive order that hires and trains civilians to work on climate change projects, according to environmental media organization Grist. The effort is a “precautionary step” to make it more difficult for the incoming Trump administration to target the 15,000 taxpayer-funded jobs propped up by the ACC, which was championed by progressive lawmakers such as Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

While Biden is nominally undoing the ACC, employees of the multi-billion dollar program will keep their jobs. Many of ACC programs, such as the Forest Corps in Northern California, have locked down funding for years, the Grist reported. The ACC’s variety of programs are also funded through a hodgepodge of federal agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, the Interior, Agriculture, Labor and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps, which could make it difficult for the Trump administration to axe the spending.

Biden’s September 2023 executive order claimed the ACC would “train young people in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience skills, create good-paying jobs and tackle the climate crisis.” It also sought to “improve on President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps by rectifying the racial and gender inequities of the past to build a climate corps for today,” Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey said during a January 2024 ACC information session.

The climate public works program has drawn the ire of many Republicans and energy experts, with Republican Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell describing the program in November 2021 as “pure socialist wish fulfillment,” noting that the ACC’s aim of creating taxpayer-funded jobs came at a time of an immense labor shortage.

Former Republican Texas State Rep. and CEO of the American Energy Institute Jason Isaac echoed McConnell’s sentiment in a written statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation: “The American Climate Corps represents a waste of taxpayer dollars, echoing the same pitfalls as the proposed National Climate Bank. These programs distort free markets, prioritize optics over measurable results, and provide no environmental benefits. Instead of solving real problems like energy reliability and affordability, these initiatives misdirect resources that could otherwise drive innovation and economic prosperity.”

Meanwhile, Steve Milloy, senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former Trump EPA Transition Team Member, told the DCNF Trump should reverse Biden’s 2023 executive order: “Biden created the American Climate Corps by Executive order. President Trump should roll it back the same way. It is not possible for the Climate Corps to improve the weather, and it was not authorized by Congress in the first place.”

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Ocasio-Cortez was instrumental in the program’s establishment, recommending its creation as part of the Democratic Party’s campaign climate task force, and reintroducing legislation that would have established the ACC prior to Biden’s executive order.

“The so-called ‘Climate Corps’ is nothing more than a Green New Deal pipedream that is so unpopular that President Biden couldn’t even get it passed in the democratic-controlled Congress and had to rely on a cobbled together web of left-wing groups to fund these fanciful mandarins tasked with prioritizing Progressive Lifestyle Choices,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers and the former solicitor general of Arizona, told the DCNF. “The Biden administration continues to waste as much taxpayer money as it possibly can on its way out the door in a ridiculous effort to hamper the incoming Trump administration’s commonsense policies that will lower prices for the American people.”

The American Climate Corps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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