The biggest heist in human history.
Here's what makes this potentially criminal, according to the reporting of Real Clear Investigation's Jim Varney: They didn't just push out billions to their political cronies, but then they covered their tracks attempting to make it impossible to trace the money.
In law, that is evidence of conscienceness of guilt. If you shoot someone while hunting, you could claim that you thought your friend was a deer so you didn't have a guilty mind.
But if you attempt to conceal the body, or flee the scene and pretend you weren't there, juries can infer from your actions that you knew you were guilty of a crime.
When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President's envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30?
The task was complicated by the fact most of the money -- $20 billion -- would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such gargantuan grants.
In hindsight, it's easy to suspect that corners were cut, or laws were broken, or, at the very least, extraordinary measures were taken.
Those possibilities are clearly on the mind of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as he tries to unravel what happened to Inflation Reduction Act spending that the Biden White House's Office of Management and Budget and the EPA decided to expedite before the November election -- an effort that included moving the roughly $20 billion to a private institution, Citibank, away from oversight of the Treasury Department.
On Wednesday, Zeldin moved to terminate the arrangements as the enriched nonprofits have filed lawsuits looking to protect their grants. The battle has thrust into the spotlight what had been a rather quiet attempt by the Biden administration to spend the $27 billion.
The money was put into the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a new entity born in 2022's Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats pushed through Congress without any Republican support.
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The grants, unveiled April 4, 2024, came with its built-in deadline to push the money out just months away. So a political deal was struck between the White House's Office of Management and Budget and EPA, current agency officials told RealClearInvestigations. As a hedge against future administration attempts to curb the program, the deal classified the now-suspect $20 billion in a novel way making it hard to track.
Zeldin has asked the EPA's inspector general and the Department of Justice to investigate the unorthodox arrangement.
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The fund was broken into three parts. The two largest, the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF) and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator (CCIA), received huge sums, totaling $20 billion. Notably, as RCI reported last October, grants went to nonprofits that had paltry assets, had been granted their nonprofit status only the month before, or had people associated with them that had previously served various federal or state Democratic administrations. For example, the Coalition for Green Capital, Wise's former outfit, was awarded $5.1 billion.
Three weeks later, an arrangement was made between OMB and EPA in which the money was designated "non-exchange" rather than "exchange" -- a first for EPA funds, according to current officials. That label allowed for the money to be moved to recipients in lump funds rather than parceled out over the length of the deals with the nonprofits, which in most cases were slated to run until 2029, 2030, or later, records show. It also called for an outside financial institution to manage the money, in part because the agency had zero experience in handling grants of this size.
Although the language in the Inflation Reduction Act dealing with the Greenhouse Gas funds does not use "shall," the word Congress usually employs to indicate that something is required, the law did impose a deadline of Sept. 30 -- the end of the fiscal year -- EPA officials and legal experts agree.
On June 27, as the EPA was making its deals with the nonprofits, Biden had his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, and on July 21 Biden ended his re-election campaign and threw his support to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The Greenhouse Gas fund money remained unobligated at that point, according to EPA officials.
The deals were finally completed and the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator money was obligated to the nonprofits on Aug. 16, according to a timeline provided to RCI. That left $7 billion, the portion that comprised the third component of the fund, Solar For All.
At that point, the $20 billion, though obligated, remained with the Treasury, officials said. A memorandum of understanding between EPA and the Treasury Department on moving the mountain of cash was not signed until Sept. 6.
Two weeks later, the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee held a hearing to learn more about EPA funding oversight, calling the agency's inspector general Sean O'Donnell to testify. O'Donnell made clear he had never seen the maneuvers the EPA was making with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and said neither he nor his staff would be able to stay on top of it.
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Yet it was not until Nov. 12, three working days after Trump beat Harris in the 2024 election, that the EPA began talks with Citibank about taking control of the $20 billion, Trump administration officials told RCI. During those negotiations, on Dec. 5, Project Veritas released an undercover video of an EPA official laughing about what he considered an extraordinary process, likening it to "throwing gold bars off the deck of the Titanic."
The Citibank arrangement effectively removing direct EPA oversight, and with interest on the $20 billion going to the grant recipients, was signed on Dec. 27, agency officials told RCI....
Critics of the spending said the timeline smacks of shady politics.
Steve Milloy, a skeptic of apocalyptic global warming, said he has received a government grant and his experience was profoundly different than the one enjoyed by Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund winners. His process was an uncomfortable one that lasted 10 months, he said.
"They crawled up my ass, and that was for a small grant," he said.
The contrast is striking, in his opinion.
"I've never seen anything like this," he said. "It is fishy ... I think they thought they would win reelection and panicked when they lost. It seems like all of this is being done without due diligence or accountability."