Top executives of a green organization that the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) selected to receive billions in public funds have collectively made hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal political donations to Democratic candidates and organizations in recent years, a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) data found.
The Biden EPA chose the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) as an awardee of $5 billion in taxpayer funds through the administration’s massive Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) program in April 2024. Reed Hundt, the CGC’s former CEO and chairman, has personally donated nearly $60,000 to Democratic candidates and aligned political organizations going back to 2013, while Richard Kauffman — the group’s CEO who replaced Hundt in January — has personally donated more than $600,000 to help Democrats since 2020, according to FEC data.
In 2024 the EPA awarded the Coalition for Green Capital a $5 BILLION grant to create an NGO “Green Bank” outside congressional control.
Reed Hundt, the group’s CEO, has some *interesting* tweets for a guy leading a “non-partisan” group with $5 billion of taxpayer money…🧵 pic.twitter.com/tB1UxqVm8q
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) December 31, 2024
Hundt made donations of $10,000 to the Harris Victory Fund and Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2024, and he also cut a $10,000 check to the Democratic State Central Committee of Maryland in 2016, FEC records show. Kauffman, meanwhile, gave $150,000 to the DNC in 2020 before giving another $20,900 to the DNC in 2024, the same year in which he made a $50,000 contribution to the Harris Victory Fund, government records show.
Kaufmann also donated to numerous state-level Democrat Party organizations and to boost Democrat Senate candidates like former Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey in the 2024 race, FEC records show. Notably, the CGC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, meaning that it may not directly or indirectly engage in politics, at least as far as the Internal Revenue Service is currently concerned.
“Between 2009 and 2023, CGC and its network mobilized more than $25 billion in public and private capital across America to deliver more affordable electricity, clean air and water, as well as the power to help ensure America’s AI leadership,” a CGC spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF. The CGC spokesperson declined to address specific questions about how it squares the political spending of Hundt and Kauffman, as well as the political connections of other board members, with the organization’s official status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Hundt formerly worked in the Clinton administration as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and was a close ally of Vice President Al Gore, while Kauffman was a senior advisor to former Energy Secretary Steven Chu during the Obama administration, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Notably, Hundt’s personal account on X featured numerous anti-Trump posts — including ones endorsing efforts to remove Trump from the ballot — before it was deleted. Hundt did not respond to a request for comment.
The CGC has received funding in the past from left-of-center and environmentalist nonprofits including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the ClimateWorks Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The CGC features a number of other Democrat insiders in its ranks, the DCNF reported in 2023 when the group was rumored to be on the shortlist for a major EPA payday. For example, its board of directors includes David Hayes, who served as a climate advisor to former President Joe Biden; Cecilia Martinez, a former official in the Biden White House Council on Environmental Quality; Julie Greene Collier, chief of staff for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a major organized labor federation that endorsed Biden and, subsequently, former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. The union donated cash to help Democrats in the 2024 cycle, according to FEC records.
“Coalition for Green Capital, like so many organizations funded by the Biden Administration, has no business receiving a dollar of funding from the federal government, much less billions of dollars,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center, told the DCNF. “It is plain to see that the organization is intended to be a slush fund for bailing out the floundering green energy investments of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors.”
Notably, two other groups that the Biden EPA picked to receive billions of taxpayer dollars — Power Forward Communities and Climate United — are also loaded with Democrat insiders, the DCNF reported previously. The political connections that each of these recipients possess caught the attention of congressional Republicans in May 2024, and current EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is working to claw back as much cash from the GGRF as possible.
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