A lawsuit may expose how the Democratic Green New Deal really worked.
Imagine if Republicans gave the Trump Administration tens of billions of dollars to dole out to right-wing groups to sprinkle around to favored businesses. That’s what Democrats did in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The Trump team’s effort to break up this spending racket has led to a court brawl, which could be educational.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin recently canceled some $20 billion in grants that his Biden predecessors rushed out to leftwing groups from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Democrats established this quasi-private green bank in the IRA to avoid government oversight of climate spending.
Mr. Zeldin claims the freeze is needed because of “substantial concerns regarding program integrity, the award process, programmatic fraud, waste, and abuse, and misalignment with the Agency’s priorities.” He’s right that the program is rife with political conflicts. In one example, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund director Jahi Wise oversaw a $5 billion grant to his former employer, Coalition for Green Capital.
The Biden EPA awarded another $2 billion to Power Forward Communities, an umbrella group of climate outfits that was formed in 2023 supposedly to “finance home energy efficiency upgrades.” But the IRA includes tax credits and other grant programs for this purpose. Power Forward’s real purpose is to spread taxpayer funds to progressives.
One Power Forward member is Rewiring America, which is backed by the Windward Fund, a nonprofit managed by the liberal dark money group Arabella Advisors. Rewiring America hired Stacey Abrams as a senior counsel in 2023 to “guide the organization as it builds the tools and capacity” to connect Americans—i.e., liberal groups—to “Inflation Reduction Act incentives.” Ms. Abrams is the former candidate for Georgia Governor who refused to concede she’d lost for years.
