‘It is just like a money laundering scheme,’ expert tells the Free Beacon
The Environmental Protection Agency has no ability to track or conduct oversight of more than $650 million in taxpayer funds that a Biden-backed green group wired to dozens of credit union accounts last month, the agency told the Washington Free Beacon.
In mid-February, the New York-based eco group Inclusiv—which received $1.9 billion last year as part of the EPA’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program—transferred $651 million to 108 credit unions across 27 states and Puerto Rico. The group said the credit unions would use the funding to offer financing for green energy projects such as solar installations and electric vehicle chargers within their jurisdictions.
Inclusiv initiated the transfer on the same day that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin discovered that the Biden administration had parked $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund funding in accounts at an outside financial institution, limiting federal control and oversight of the money. In collaboration with the Department of Justice, Zeldin ultimately froze the accounts, but not before Inclusiv completed its transaction.
“The passthrough structure of these grants is a significant deviation from how EPA regularly conducts oversight of grantees,” EPA spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou told the Free Beacon. “EPA has no visibility nor role into understanding how these taxpayer dollars are being spent on the ground.”
Traditionally, the EPA selects which projects to fund and distributes grants directly to developers. In this case, however, Inclusiv solicited grant applications from credit unions who will then select which projects the federal funds will finance and determine the terms developers must meet—a setup that takes the EPA entirely out of the loop.
It’s the latest issue to emerge from the Biden administration’s efforts to rapidly implement massive green energy programs during its final months in office. And it raises additional questions about the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in particular—Zeldin has likened the program to a “green slush fund” and has opened broad probes into the fund as a whole.
After Zeldin’s team located that $20 billion in program funding at an outside financial institution, the Free Beacon reported that the Biden EPA had awarded $2 billion of that sum to a brand new environmental group linked to Georgia Democratic politician Stacey Abrams and another $5 billion to a senior Biden EPA official’s most recent employer.
Inclusiv’s $1.9 billion grant was also part of that $20 billion sum.
Overall, in April 2024, the EPA dished out that $20 billion to just eight nonprofit organizations—some of which had been formed for the sole purpose of receiving the funding. The Biden administration designed the program to act as a “green bank,” meaning those eight award recipients will act as pass-throughs, doling out subawards and deciding which green projects to fund nationwide.
“This award will enable us to direct grants and assistance to high-impact credit unions and cooperativas that create the conditions for an inclusive and equitable transition to a greening economy,” Inclusiv president and CEO Cathie Mahon said in August.
According to an “investment strategy” document Inclusiv submitted to the EPA last year and reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group intends to use $1.7 billion to award pass-through grants. The remaining $187 million, it said, will be used to fund its own operations and technical assistance services.
The scope of that funding dwarfs the amount of money Inclusiv previously handled. In 2023, Inclusiv reported $11.9 million in revenue and $10.1 million in expenses, according to the group’s most recent tax filings.
“This is borderline fraudulent. It is just like a money laundering scheme,” said Travis Fisher, the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute. Fisher is the author of a forthcoming report that concludes Biden-era green programs created “an overwhelming and undue burden on taxpayers.”
“I am frustrated to my core,” Fisher told the Free Beacon. “One thing that I think is even more frustrating is when we compile the entire spending of all of what the Inflation Reduction Act authorizes, it is such a staggering amount of money that the part that we’re talking about that is probably fraudulent, or at the very least shady and questionable, is a tiny fraction of the total spending.”
“By comparison to the rest of it, it seems small,” he continued. “They thought they could fly under the radar with that and we were essentially all fooled and caught flat-footed.”
Inclusiv did not respond to a request for comment.
