The Trump administration is moving to take back $20 billion for a green grantmaking program that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rushed to obligate in its final days.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced Wednesday night that his agency is working to reassume control of the funding for the Biden EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), a massive spending program designed to provide cash to coalitions of green groups that then use the funds to finance green technology and other similar projects. At least three of the eight organizations that were selected as awardees are loaded with Democrat Party insiders.
“One of my very top priorities at EPA is to be an excellent steward of your hard-earned tax dollars. There will be zero tolerance of any waste and abuse,” Zeldin said in his Wednesday statement posted to X. “We will review every penny that has gone out the door. The days of irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.”
Among the awardees selected by the Biden EPA are Climate United, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, three groups that are taking home almost $14 billion combined to establish financing operations for a wide variety of green technology and energy projects under the GGRF’s National Clean Investment Fund. Each of these groups feature combinations of former Obama and Biden administration employees and officials from labor unions and left-wing environmental activist groups on their boards.
Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, published secretly-recorded footage of a Biden EPA appointee discussing how the agency was “tossing gold bars off the Titanic” in the final days of the Biden administration and before the Trump administration arrived to curb excessive federal spending. Zeldin referenced the footage in his statement announcing the agency’s intent to recover the $20 billion.
However, the Biden EPA parked the $20 billion at Citibank before the Trump administration’s arrival, ostensibly in an attempt to make it more difficult for incoming Trump EPA personnel to access the funds. Zeldin made clear in his remarks that Citibank is not suspected of any sort of wrongdoing with its involvement, but the Trump EPA wants to terminate the underlying agreement with the bank that the Biden EPA signed.
“Roughly twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. 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,” Zeldin said in his statement.
Zeldin added that he will be referring the matter to the EPA Office of the Inspector General and that his agency will also work with the Department of Justice.
“Protect the Public’s Trust, along with the Daily Caller News Foundation, has been among those sounding the alarm on this greendoggle for over two years now. Many of us recognized the issues and potential for abuse that were likely to manifest themselves due to the manner in which the Biden administration structured the program. Many of the recipient organizations were tied to the Biden administration and its political allies,” Michael Chamberlain, executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog group, told the DCNF. “In fact, one of the recipients of billions from the GGRF had a board member who was likely involved in creating the program while serving in the Biden White House. What a surprise that EPA awarded funds to this group … It appears as though our concerns with this program were more than justified.”
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