The senior Biden administration official tasked with directing former President Joe Biden’s $27 billion climate grant program oversaw a $5 billion grant from the program to his former employer, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
Jahi Wise joined the Environmental Protection Agency in December 2022 as the founding director of the newly created Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF, according to his LinkedIn profile. In April 2024, while Wise served in that role, the EPA announced that it would award GGRF grants totaling $20 billion to just eight nonprofits, including the Coalition for Green Capital, a Washington, D.C.-based group that received $5 billion as part of the announcement and where Wise previously worked as the director of policy. There is no indication that Wise recused himself from that process.
Wise departed the Coalition for Green Capital in January 2021 to join the White House Climate Policy Office as a special assistant to the president, a position he held until he joined the EPA less than two years later.
The EPA’s $5 billion grant to the Coalition for Green Capital and Wise’s involvement is also notable because former Biden administration official David Hayes serves on the group’s board of directors. Hayes rejoined the group’s board in October 2022 after having served as a special assistant to the president in the White House Climate Policy Office since January 2021, meaning he and Wise were close colleagues at the White House for roughly 21 months.
After joining the Coalition for Green Capital’s board, Hayes said he was “hopeful that tens of billions of dollars of additional clean power investment, focused on low-income and disadvantaged communities, lies in the immediate future of CGC.” The group simultaneously appointed Cecilia Martinez, who had served as a Biden White House environmental justice official, to its board, saying the pair would be involved in its forthcoming Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund application submission.
The revelation that Wise was involved in doling out a massive grant benefiting both his former employer and former White House colleague raises serious ethics and conflict-of-interest questions, experts told the Washington Free Beacon. Federal ethics laws place strict limits on officials’ involvement in matters involving past employers.
It also provides fresh fodder for Trump administration officials who have set the GGRF program and its massive grants in their sights. On Tuesday, Denise Cheung, the top criminal prosecutor in the Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney’s Office, was forced to resign after she declined to open a grand jury investigation into the EPA’s GGRF program funding, CNN first reported.
“The story of the Biden EPA’s gold bars never stops,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin told the Free Beacon. “The waste and abuse was so deeply interwoven in the last administration that not only did the leaders who oversaw this not bat an eye at billions of your taxpayer dollars going towards partisan pet projects, but serious conflicts of interest were ignored. That should have raised red flags.”
Zeldin—who added that he is “committed to restoring accountability in government, focusing the agency on its core mission”—announced last week that he and White House DOGE officials located the $20 billion in GGRF funds, including the Coalition for Green Capital’s $5 billion grant, in a Citibank account. He said clawing back those funds is a priority and said the placement of the funds at an outside bank limits federal oversight.
The Biden EPA appears to have parked those funds at Citibank in August 2024, a first-of-its-kind arrangement at the EPA, shortly before Wise departed the agency. In September 2024, Wise joined billionaire Democratic donor George Soros’s behemoth nonprofit the Open Society Institute as a “leadership in government” fellow—during the 18-month fellowship, Wise will study policies that accelerate the mobilization of public and private capital into climate projects.
The Coalition for Green Capital and Wise did not respond to requests for comment.
“For years, Protect the Public’s Trust and others have been warning of the GGRF’s potential for abuse, to say nothing of the greater IRA,” said Michael Chamberlain, the director of watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust. “Between David Hayes, who sandwiched stints at CGC with one at the White House in which he helped create IRA climate programs, presumably including GGRF, and Jahi Wise, CGC couldn’t have been better positioned for the GGRF windfall.”
“The way they and others pin-balled around the Biden administration’s ‘green’ offices and then shot back out to the climate industry should be set to The Benny Hill Show theme,” Chamberlain added. “Unfortunately, there’s nothing funny about the unheard-of billions in taxpayer dollars they helped transform into an activist slush fund. Administrator Zeldin has his work cut out for him.”
Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of ethics watchdog Americans for Public Trust, echoed Chamberlain and said Zeldin should continue to investigate GGRF grants issued during the Biden administration under Wise’s leadership.
“The founding director of the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awarding $5 billion to his former employer is the sort of self-dealing revolving door that has become a hallmark of green energy handouts,” Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Secretary Zeldin is right to set his sights on the Coalition for Green Capital as he seeks to reclaim taxpayer money.”
Wise, meanwhile, emerged as a hero of Biden’s climate agenda among his colleagues and media outlets given his role overseeing the GGRF program.
Danielle Deane-Ryan, a former GGRF senior adviser, said in a LinkedIn post last month that Wise’s leadership was “critical to getting GGRF launched and funds obligated.” And Politico and Newsweek each identified Wise as one of a handful of officials overseeing key Biden-era climate programs, though the two outlets failed to ask him about his relationship with Coalition for Green Capital in interviews conducted after the group was awarded its grant last year.
“We are well aware of the importance of this program and the scrutiny that it warrants, and we will continue to push ourselves and our program to be as radically transparent, efficient, and effective with public funds as we can,” Wise told Politico in an April 2024 interview.
Wise and the EPA never stated that he had recused himself from the matter involving the Coalition for Green Capital.
Overall, the GGRF is the single largest non-tax investment within the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The program was created by Democrats to act as a green bank, directing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to intermediaries, which then finance green energy and environmental justice projects across the United States.
The GGRF was immediately criticized by Republican lawmakers and energy experts after it was established, with experts warning that its size and scope could lead to significant government waste and abuse. They also argued that, while massive, the program would have little impact on climate change.
“The system is corrupt in the sense that there’s an enormous amount of self dealing that’s going on,” Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said in an interview. “It really has nothing to do with climate as a practical matter because there’s no evidence of a crisis and, even if there was, these programs would make undetectable differences anyway.”
Zycher authored a report in December 2022 that concluded the “obvious objective” of the GGRF program is “the provision of large subsidies to favored interest groups.”
