During its first three months in operation, a green nonprofit linked to Stacey Abrams, Power Forward Communities, reported just $100 in revenue. Shortly thereafter, the Biden administration awarded it $2 billion to help install solar panels, EV chargers, and other green tech.
The Biden EPA announced that grant in an April 2024 press release lauding the organization for its dedication to “decarbonizing and transforming American housing” in “low-income and disadvantaged communities.” But it didn’t send Power Forward Communities the money directly. Instead, the Free Beacon‘s Thomas Catenacci reports, it parked the $2 billion meant for Abrams’s group, plus another $18 billion in taxpayer-funded “Greenhouse Gas Reduction” grants, into an account at Citibank.
The arrangement allows Power Forward Communities and seven other grant recipients to draw from the funds over time. In doing so, it “restricts the Trump administration’s ability to claw the funds back,” writes Catenacci.
“The revelation that Power Forward Communities is among the beneficiaries of the funds Zeldin’s team located raises ethics questions about how the Biden administration selected recipients of such massive grants and whether it played favorites when doling those grants out,” Catenacci continues. “It also appears to validate concerns expressed for years by Republicans that Biden administration allies would prop up organizations that were specifically designed to receive federal funding under programs like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created to operate as a ‘green bank’ by Democrats’ behemoth Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”
Read more: DOGE Finds $2 Billion in Taxpayer Funds Earmarked for Stacey Abrams-Linked Group
The Los Angeles wildfires are fully contained but left-wing mayor Karen Bass is still feeling the heat. She sat down with Fox’s L.A. affiliate on Tuesday to discuss the infamous trip that placed her at a cocktail party in Ghana when the fires broke out.
Talk about an object lesson in passing the buck. Bass carped that nobody in her administration warned her that “something terrible could happen, and maybe you shouldn’t have gone on the trip.”
And yet, the L.A. division of the National Weather Service publicly upgraded the severity of its wildfire watch one day before Bass left the country, warning of “Critical Fire Conditions” and “Major Risk” before urging residents to “Take Action.”
The day after she left, on Jan. 5, most of Los Angeles County was put under a “red flag warning,” a designation that indicates the most severe fire risk. Bass stayed in Ghana, and the fires broke out on Jan. 7.
“The interview is the latest example of Bass’s attempts to shift responsibility or cast blame on others for leadership failures ahead of the wildfires, which are already projected to be the costliest disaster in the nation’s history with an estimated $250 billion in damage,” our Susannah Luthi writes. “It comes as she battles dismal approval numbers and threats of a recall.” Harris-Bass 2028?
According to the Washington Post, the Palestinian Authority Security Forces is “the linchpin to the Palestinian Authority’s ability to maintain law and order” in Gaza and the West Bank. In the reality-based community, it’s a driving force of terrorism in the West Bank, where its members have carried out scores of attacks on both Israeli soldiers and civilians. In the past, those members have done so with the help of millions in U.S. taxpayer funding. Now, the money is frozen.
The move, our Adam Kredo reports, is part of the Trump administration’s broader global aid freeze and “comes as the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, jockey for control of post-war Gaza.” It also comes after the Biden administration “pushed to make PASF a central player in its plans for the war-torn strip, showering it with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer cash even as it acknowledged that the aid could boost Hamas.”
That funding was a policy reversal from the first Trump administration, which froze aid to the PASF. After old Joe got the gravy train going again, the PASF’s off-duty members carried out dozens of attacks against Israelis.
“In February 2024, for example, a first lieutenant in the PASF opened fire on Israeli troops at a checkpoint near the northern West Bank city of Nablus,” writes Kredo. “Another member of the forces, Capt. Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, was a terrorist leader with the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an internationally designated terror group. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike after carrying out an April 2023 shooting in East Jerusalem that wounded two Israeli civilians.”
Israeli groups celebrated the funding pause, with Meir Deutsch, director of the Regavim movement, telling Kredo that Trump understands “the true nature of the Palestinian Authority, which shares the same ambitions and objectives as Hamas.”
Away from the Beacon:
- Left-wing protesters broke out in interpretive dance to protest Donald Trump’s equitable shakeup of the Kennedy Center board. Watch the video at your own peril here.
- Speaking of Stacey Abrams-linked nonprofits, staffers at the embattled New Georgia Project, the voting rights group Big Stace founded in 2013, say they were fired for trying to unionize.
- Hakeem Jeffries has a new name for an upcoming spinoff of The Cannonball Run Donald Trump and his allies: “Captain Chaos and the Extreme MAGA Republicans.”
- New DNC chair Ken Martin released his “framework detailing how the Democratic Party will fight against Trump’s war on working people.” It’s already getting rave reviews like this one from Yashar Ali: “This is a deeply embarrassing and useless document from the DNC Chair.”
