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 appointee talking 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 Biden administration claimed “will focus on investing in harder-to-reach market segments like consumers, small businesses, small farms, community facilities, and schools.”
In an interview Tuesday on Fox News, Zeldin provided more details describing his concerns about lack of transparency and oversight, saying, “$20 billion going out the door up front should be a big red flag.”
He described a frenzied internal process at EPA during Biden’s final weeks in which regulators and the Office of General Counsel were repeatedly drafting and amending agreements right up until Trump’s inauguration, telling host John Roberts, “what’s crazy about these different agreements that I’ve read through over the course of the last few days is that they deliberately in writing make sure that they are drastically reducing accountability and oversight by the EPA, by government.”
This all led him to the conclusion that “the whole scheme was something that was extremely irresponsible before you even get started at analyzing each individual recipient.”
Though he was careful to specify he is not alleging any wrongdoing by CitiBank, Zeldin added that “the financial agent agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated, and the bank must immediately return all of the gold bars.”
This controversy, along with the array of complex schemes inside the USAID operations that seem so clearly designed to mask the ultimate disposition of billions of taxpayer dollars, raises broader legitimate concerns about the continued propriety of the laws governing these supposed “non-profit” NGOs.
The question of whether these funds are properly distributed is almost secondary to the reality that the apparent intent of the Biden officials was to have them distributed through these NGOs to make the money near impossible for incoming Trump officials to properly police.
Zeldin’s overriding problem, though, is that all this green funny money was authorized by Congress as part of the Orwellian Inflation Reduction Act. Whether he can find a way to claw it back now without involving Congress is anyone’s guess, but he seems determined to try. We should wish him well in that endeavor.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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