The Biden administration is trying to get as much climate money committed as it can before Donald Trump returns to the White House.

Among the beneficiaries of that may be Rivian, an electric vehicle manufacturer. I wrote about this in a recent Capital Letter:

The…administration…has, on a preliminary basis, offered Rivian a $6.6 billion loan. The money will come from the Energy Department Loans Office under a program to support new technologies (a worthy enough goal), which as The Hill points out (I wonder why), “gave funds to Tesla in 2010.” That’s true enough, the loan was for $465 million, which, even after taking account of Bidenflation, was rather less than $6.6 billion today.

There’s much more on the proposed transaction and Rivian’s checkered history in that Capital Letter.

Grants or loans of large amounts of taxpayer money have a way of coming with strings attached unrelated to the financial return to those (the taxpayers) providing the cash. There’s a reason why industrial policy and corporatism are so associated with cronyism.

And so, from the Wall Street Journal on December 25:

President Biden in September issued an executive order directing agencies to prioritize projects that promote “positive labor-management relations” with “agreements designed to facilitate first collective bargaining agreements, voluntary union recognition, and neutrality by the employer with respect to union organizing.”

…Rivian has been tangling with the United Auto Workers union that wants to organize its employees. Bloomberg News reports that Rivian has now struck a so-called neutrality agreement with the UAW that commits the company not to oppose unionization efforts at its factory in Illinois. While the deal doesn’t take effect until the company reaches certain profitability and other metrics, it greases the wheels for future unionization.

And, the WSJ reports, a similar sort of deal has been cut with the UAW with regard to a new Ford EV plant in Tennessee. There the “neutrality agreement” allows unions to “organize workers through a card-check process rather than a secret-ballot election.”

Hmmm.

The Energy Department “recently finalized a $9.6 billion loan for the Ford-SK On battery joint-venture in Tennessee and Kentucky.”

Oh.

The Wall Street Journal concludes:

Industrial policy inevitably puts political demands above economic or commercial priorities, as taxpayers may learn the hard way with Rivian.

Industrial policy is what it is.