The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hastily shoveled billions in taxpayer dollars to Democrat-aligned green groups without having concrete agreements in place, according to documents obtained by watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT).
The documents indicate that the Biden EPA awarded grants under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) — a program that shelled out $20 billion to nonprofits linked to Democrat donors and insiders — on a timeline that allowed changes to the terms even after the money was awarded. The Biden EPA had until September 2024 to award the taxpayer funds, and staff were advised to delay outstanding questions and issues in order to meet the looming award deadline, the documents indicate.
“The more information that is revealed about the GGRF, the shadier the entire scheme looks,” Michael Chamberlain, director of PPT, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The irony is that when federal employees finally start cutting red tape and expediting a process, it’s to make sure taxpayer money is irrecoverable to taxpayers. It’s clear from these documents that Biden’s EPA cut corners to get the money ‘obligated’ before the funds expired on September 30, 2024, even if it meant ‘finalizing’ agreements with grantees they fully intended to re-negotiate later. In the private sector, this is the kind of thing that sometimes lands people in jail.”
2024 EPA 05147 Responsive RecordsPPTFinal by audreystreb on Scribd
Although the money was legally committed in August 2024, the Biden EPA mapped out a timeline that extended revising terms and conditions past the September 2024 deadline to “resolve outstanding issues through December 31, 2024.” Another slide notes the looming deadline and argues that EPA staff needs to “accept that not all questions will be resolved prior to award.”
E&E News reporter Jean Chemnick asked in May 2024 about GGRF’s “transparency and accountability guardrails,” and in response, a Biden official argued that the program had strong oversight when it planned to change the terms after the funding deadline, the documents indicate. The Biden official pointed to other similar EPA programs as examples of the agency’s experience, though the programs listed were either brand new or less than one-thousandth of the size of GGRF, the PPT notes and the documents show.
“Now we really know what throwing gold bars off the Titanic looks like,” Chamberlain said, referencing a video covertly recorded by conservative activist group Project Veritas in which a Biden EPA official likened the rush to fund green groups before Trump’s arrival to hurling money off a sinking ship. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has also repeatedly cited the Project Veritas video in comments about the GGRF.
Several of the GGRF grantees are laden with Democrat donors and former high-level Obama and Biden administration officials. Established under Biden’s signature 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the multi-billion-dollar program budget far exceeded any previous EPA budget. Federal reviewers flagged “excessive” executive pay and questionable financial statements ahead of the final GGRF grantee selections, the DCNF previously reported.
Coalition for Green Capital (CGC), Power Forward Communities (PFC) and Climate United Fund (CUF) are among the three grantees loaded with Democrat donors and insiders that federal reviewers flagged for seemingly unjustified high executive salaries.
CGC declined to comment and PFC did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
CU pointed to appeals court filings which confirm that the terms and conditions were changed in December 2024, though it argued that these changes were not substantive.
“Changes to terms were administrative in nature and provided more clarity around reporting requirements and account controls, as detailed in court filings,” a CU spokesperson told the DCNF. “EPA has not used the changes to terms and conditions as a part of their legal arguments since they were addressed in court earlier in the case.”
Additionally, the CU spokesperson said that adjusting federal grant terms is not out of the ordinary and that the Biden EPA was transparent about the GGRF throughout the program.
“The more you look at this, the worse it gets. Not only was the Biden EPA tossing billions of taxpayer dollars ‘off the Titanic,’ to borrow their language, but under every stone you find more well documented incidents of self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, and intentionally reduced agency oversight,” Zeldin told the DCNF. “These grants were rightfully terminated months ago, and Congress just fully repealed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program in the One Big Beautiful Bill.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed the GGRF program and rescinded remaining unobligated program funds.
The agency’s inspector general, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI are investigating the GGRF for potential fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars, and Zeldin has highlighted the program as a key example of Biden-era corruption on numerous occasions.
EPA froze 129 Citibank accounts holding the funds in February, and in response, several grantees sued the agency and Citibank, arguing that the freeze lacked legal justification and that the EPA had acted properly in distributing the money. An appeals court intervened to stay an earlier ruling that would have forced the EPA to free the frozen funds.
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