Now that DOGE is on the job, excavation work has started throughout a number of federal agencies, and Lee Zeldin, the newly installed chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, has found a doozy.
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).
Any questions as to why the green lobbies are so powerful? Look at those amounts. So it's not just foreign billionaires like Hansjörg Wyss (who's worth a mere $4.7 billion) who are meddling in U.S. politics through green activism, it's NGOs who get paid federal tax dollars by the billions.
One of them, the Climate United Fund made bank with $7 billion tossed out from the dying Biden administration like piñata candy.
A search of the Wayback machine shows a 2024 page index to that 404 page with a few potentially useful links -- except that the Board of Directors link shows "network error" in retrieval: http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://weareclimateunited.org/board-of-directors.
Meanwhile, this staff page snapshotted on Wayback from October 2024 shows whited-out main content with only the top and bottom banners included: http://web.archive.org/web/20241013032606/https://weareclimateunited.org/staff
Based on the looks of it, they may have scrubbed this information good, even from archiving.
Seven billion public dollars and nobody knows who they are.
Which is why Zeldin is curious about who these exiting EPA staff were and where they went after leaving their jobs at EPA.
If they went to any of these places that just got these hastily delivered mega-grants shoveled out the door at the last minute, it looks like actual corruption.
According to Zeldin, as quoted in the New York Post:
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."
Which, given the amounts taken, was obviously a corrupt maneuver, redolent of Mexico's onetime practice of the exiting president unleashing "la piñata" or money shovelouts and outright stealings of all sorts going out the door.
That ought to be illegal here, but apparently it was viewed as a model by the Bidenites, and it raises questions as to how long this has been going on, and how much the ultra-corrupt Biden administration took it to new heights, as he did for everything that was corrupt.
It also calls to mind that President Trump's former Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, had a giant pot of COVID money set aside in a pot and not needing it for anything as the pandemic was ending, declined to spend it, quite unlike the Bidenites, not being into government corruption -- while the Bidenites, when they got in, viewed it as another pot to shovel out and wasted it all, propelling the inflation we see today. What a night and day difference.
EPA is a gargantuan government organization with an $11 billion budget (not counting that $20 billion green slush fund obviously) with 17,202 full time employees and another 1,500 or so part time employees. How many of those who exited benefited from this slush fund?
If any did, it goes to show that the viewed it as "their" money, not the taxpayers' money, and pulled off a monstrous corruption feat by arranging to benefit from it going out the door.
What a vile administration this is if this is what happened. Why are these NGOs benefiting from billions in federal funds so eager to not get their names out now? What are they hiding?
Right now, the swift spendathon of more than $20 billion to big-dollar NGOs with green political agenda and a lot of woke projects is highly suspicious. If anyone at EPA benefited from it, it's corruption unlike anything we see even in the third world.
Zeldin has a hell of an Augean stable to clean out with this just the first revelation. Any questions as to why the U.S. debt now tops $36 trillion? Let's hope he can claw it back as he would like to do.