EXPOSED: Biden’s Green Slush Fund

March 24, 2025

Biden’s Green Slush Fund.

There has long been a problem with the way taxpayer dollars are handed out to support renewable energy endeavors. It is almost as if because of the warm and fuzzy packaging wrapped around “green energy” by activists and politicians that the rules for renewable energy are made up and the money doesn’t matter. One of the first examples, the Solyndra scandal under then-President Barack Obama that cost taxpayers nearly $600 million, is nearly 20 years-old. But, the new administration in Washington is finally trying to make the green movement play by the same rules as the rest of us and treating taxpayer dollars with the thoughtfulness they should be. 

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin has terminated several grants given under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) “based on substantial concerns regarding … program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with agency’s priorities, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.” Last week, a court stalled Zeldin’s efforts to stop the grants claiming they did not reach the level of actual fraud. The court did however leave the funds frozen as the case proceeds.

The GGRF was founded under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Zeldin discovered that “the Biden EPA parked tens of billions of taxpayer dollars at an outside financial institution in a manner that deliberately reduced the ability of EPA to conduct proper oversight.” This is the program that one Biden operative likened to “tossing gold bars off the Titanic” as they rushed to give away billions in taxpayer dollars before Inauguration Day. Even if some of the spending went to legitimate organizations with beneficial projects, how can officials be doing their due diligence to ensure that—especially in an area like green energy that has a decades-long history of lacking oversight and misspending taxpayer money? 

Cronyism anyone? 

One grant targeted by Zeldin’s EPA was to Power Forward Communities (PFC). According to an EPA press release, PFC is “a Stacey Abrams linked organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023, was chosen to receive $2 billion—that’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue. To highlight just how unqualified this organization was, the grant agreement provided 90 days to complete How to Develop a Budget training even though the organization was instructed to start spending down the balance in the first 21 days of that timeframe.” 

In another mind-twisting example, Zeldin froze $5 billion in grant funds to the Coalition for Green Capital. When the grant was doled out to this group in April 2024, Jahi Wise was serving as the founding director of the GGRF. But, just a couple years earlier, Wise was the director of policy at, you guessed it, the Coalition for Green Capital. A Biden official, David Hayes, also served on the Coalition’s board of directors. Hayes had served as a special assistant to the president in the White House Climate Policy Office since January 2021. Wise ALSO served as a special assistant to the president in the White House Climate Policy Office from January 2021 until he moved to GGRF. If that sounds confusing, incestuous and, well, just plain wrong, that’s because it is. 

In other egregious examples, Zeldin cut “$50 million Biden-era environmental justice grant to the Climate Justice Alliance that believes ‘Climate Justice travels through a Free Palestine’.”

As of March 10, Zeldin’s EPA had canceled over 400 grants and saved American taxpayers $1.7 billion with the targeted cuts from IRA green slush funds to entities with little oversight and often lacking the ability to implement the programs the funds were allocated for. Zeldin even cut $1.1 million in media subscriptions for the agency. 

IRA subsidies were always ripe for abuse.

An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget put the price tag for energy and climate spending in the IRA at $386 billion—“mainly for new or expanded tax credits to promote clean energy generation, electrification, green technology retrofits for homes and buildings, greater use of clean fuels, environmental conservation, and wider adoption of electric vehicles, among other purposes.”

Though a Goldman Sachs report on the IRA made that projection look, well, almost reasonable. They projected that the IRA’s green subsidies would cost a whopping $1.2 trillion over time. A Wall Street Journal opinion piece said: “By Goldman’s estimate, the IRA tax credits will cost tens to hundreds of billions more than CBO estimated over 10 years. The forecast misses include electric vehicles (difference: $379 billion), green energy manufacturing ($156 billion), renewable electricity production ($82 billion), energy efficiency ($42 billion), hydrogen ($36 billion), biofuels ($34 billion) and carbon capture ($31 billion).”

The buck needs to stop here.

The Inflation Reduction Act was certainly not the beginning of exponentially higher federal subsidies going to renewable energy sources over traditional energy sources like natural gas, nuclear and oil. And, these subsidies often receive little oversight to ensure they are spent as they were intended or that they produce results that return on the taxpayer investment.

According to the Institute for Energy Research before the IRA was even a glint in climate activists’ eyes, “Federal subsidies to support renewable energy formed nearly half of all federal energy-related support between fiscal years 2016 and 2022. Traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022, while renewables, conservation and end use received a whopping 85 percent. Renewable subsidies more than doubled between FY 2016 and FY 2022, increasing to $15.6 billion in fiscal year 2022 from $7.4 billion in fiscal year 2016 (both in 2022 dollars). Federal subsidies and incentives to support renewable energy in fiscal year 2022 were almost 5 times higher than those for fossil energy, which totaled $3.2 billion in subsidies.” 

The game of treating taxpayer dollars like Monopoly money under the guise of feel-good green pipe dreams needs to end. Thankfully, we finally have some leaders standing up to do just that. The American people do in fact want affordable, reliable and CLEAN energy that provides us with energy security. But, these programs aren’t cutting it and they haven’t been for a very long time. It’s time to stop dumping money down the renewable energy drain and start doing what we know works—building infrastructure, maximizing our resources and making energy affordable again for American families.