A $20 billion Biden administration green-energy slush fund was collecting interest at a private bank and is being distributed without proper oversight, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin reveals in an exclusive interview.
President Joe Biden’s EPA parked $20 billion at the financial institution, which The Post has learned is Citibank, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. But the awardees weren’t announced until August 2024 and Citibank not brought in until September — after Biden’s disastrous June debate performance led him to withdraw from re-election in July, making a very different race with Kamala Harris the Democratic nominee.
Zeldin’s team is looking into whether former EPA employees are working at any of the grantees, which include the Opportunity Finance Network (receiving $2.29 billion), where Vice President Laura Silverman says she brings “economic, financial, and social justice to communities,” and the Native CDFI Network ($400 million), which has featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a speaker. Power Forward Communities, a $2 billion recipient, has no list of employees on its website — but does have openings for government-affairs VP, communications VP and special assistant.
The others: Climate United Fund (which got the biggest grant, nearly $7 billion), Coalition for Green Capital ($5 billion), Inclusiv ($1.87 billion), Justice Climate Fund ($940 million) and Appalachian Community Capital ($500 million).
Here Lee Zeldin tells The Post’s Kelly Jane Torrance why it was “a high priority for me and my great team to get to the bottom of these questions as quickly as possible.”
This was on our radar during the transition, when the video was posted online at the beginning of December of the Biden EPA political appointee admitting on camera they were “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
To us, that very obviously meant the “gold bars” were tax dollars and “off the Titanic” meant they were wasting it — and they knew it.
That was causing a lot of sirens to go off. It was a frequent topic of conversation in my meetings with senators — we spoke about accountability of funding during my confirmation hearing. I committed during my hearing to making this a top priority as soon as I got in, and our team has been planning for what has been months now to be able to hit the ground running and jump all over this urgent situation the moment we came into office.
So this was an all-in, top-priority effort that has instantly been yielding very important results for the taxpayers — and we’re just getting started.
This was a deliberate rush job meant to obligate all this funding with less oversight. In that video, the Biden EPA political appointee was talking multiple times about “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” and at one point also talks about how they are giving out billions of dollars to these recipient NGOs with an eye towards getting themselves jobs at them — which added a whole other layer of massive concern.
As they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic, this $20 billion pot was sent to a financial institution outside government, which was collecting interest.
The $20 billion only goes to eight entities, and we want to know if any of those eight entities have any recently employed Biden administration officials and EPA employees.
But that’s just the start of the questions, not the end of it. We also want to know the same question as it relates to all the ultimate recipients of all the funding that was rushed out the door pre-inauguration. That’s where the biggest flag was raised in the video.
Every grant is equal. We’re doing a review of everything and reviewing all the contractual agreements.
And we’re going to explore every option that’s available to us as it relates to every dollar the bank currently has: We are going to seek it to be returned to the EPA, and the first step is establishing control of those funds.
But we’re going to walk and chew gum and continue our review — and in many, many other respects — simultaneously.
As far as exact dollar amounts of each of the eight pots, we want to know not just how much has been sent but also how much has been obligated and how much is currently available and not yet obligated.
These questions highlight one of the concerns with the lack of oversight with this scheme — these questions should all be instantly available and handy for us to have the answers on. They’re not.
And there are many, many other questions that we have that we are going to get answered.
I want to highlight there’s zero evidence whatsoever of anything being done improperly by the bank.
This was an arrangement the EPA sought out, working with the Biden Treasury Department to park $20 billion outside of government and that deliberately resulted in less transparency, accountability and oversight.
And I committed to Congress and the American people during my confirmation hearing that I would do everything in my power if confirmed to ensure there wasn’t any waste and abuse and I was going to get to the bottom of all of these funds. This is something that is a highest concern and priority for us.
We have very high confidence that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
