The Quick and Shameful Death of Biden's Biggest Policy [View all]

It was far too easy for Republicans to kill the Inflation Reduction Act. Where did those who crafted it go wrong?

https://newrepublic.com/article/202755/inflation-reduction-act-biden-biggest-policy-death

https://archive.ph/TDFMt



In late 2024, an operative for the right-wing gotcha group Project Veritas clandestinely filmed his Tinder date with a 29-year-old EPA employee. The employee, who talked freely about his work distributing grant funds allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act, at one point compared that process to “throwing gold bars off the edge” of the Titanic, i.e., dispatching grants quickly before the proverbial iceberg, Donald Trump, took office and clawed back the funding.

A few months later, Lee Zeldin, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced a remarkable discovery: “My awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars. Shockingly, roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.”

There were no actual gold bars, of course. And Zeldin probably didn’t need a team to find them. Those $20 billion were part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF, a program that was meant to help low-income communities finance and develop renewable energy projects with IRA-funded grants to nonprofits. The EPA had used Citibank to transfer the funds; nearly $7 billion went to a single “far-left activist group,” in Zeldin’s description, called Climate United. (Among the supposedly radical plots the nonprofit planned to finance with that money was preconstruction on a University of Arkansas solar project, projected to save the state $120 million in energy costs.)

Alleging fraud, the EPA and the FBI demanded that Citibank freeze those funds and referred the case to the Justice Department. While such requests are normally granted only with a court order, Citibank complied, just days after Zeldin’s initial announcement. FBI agents started showing up at the homes of Climate United employees, who faced tongue-lashings by right-wing news outlets and subpoenas from Republican-controlled congressional committees that had initiated their own investigations. The DOJ’s investigation found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, however, and GGRF grantees remain locked in a legal battle with the EPA that may eventually end up in front of the Supreme Court. This spring, the EPA informed Climate United that it had terminated its grant not because of fraud but rather because of a change in administrative priorities.

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