The Biden administration tried to tie the Environmental Protection Agency‘s “hands behind its back” by sticking it with billions of dollars that was later funneled to lefty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out now.
“When I was going through the confirmation process [in January], this video comes out,” the former Long Island congressman recalled. “It was done through Project Veritas, but it was of a Biden EPA employee who was talking about how the agency was tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of dollars out the door before Inauguration Day. He was also talking about the desire to get themselves jobs at the recipient NGOs.”
After Zeldin was confirmed by the Senate, he and his staff began investigating “with great enthusiasm and eagerness.”
“Basically, every time we overturned a rock, we found something under it that was either filled with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients or reduced agency oversight,” he recounted to Devine.
Zeldin made headlines Feb. 12, when he announced that the EPA had located $20 billion “parked at an outside financial institution,” later revealed to be Citibank.
“They decided … to have that bank send the money through eight pass-through entities, all these NGOs [were] pass-through entities that were riddled with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, former Obama and Biden officials, Democratic donors … and the EPA was a party to the account control agreement with those prime recipients,” he said.
“But here’s the thing, when the money goes through the prime recipients to others — in many cases, also pass-throughs — EPA no longer is a party of the account control agreement,” Zeldin went on. “EPA is losing oversight by design intentionally.”
One example of a beneficiary from the so-called “slush fund” cited by Zeldin is Power Forward Communities, a coalition of nonprofits, including one linked to two-time Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams.
“This entity received $100 in 2023,” Zeldin said. “The Biden EPA gave them $2 billion in 2024, putting in their grant agreement a requirement that they needed to complete training called, ‘How to develop a budget within 90 days.’ So the Biden EPA said they didn’t know how to develop a budget, and yet, in that window, they were able to start spending down the balance.”
“Many of the costs are just presented [with] little or no explanation as to why they are reasonable,” Zeldin went on. “They’re paying their CEO $800,000 or COO, $450,000, [they have] 22 people receiving over $150,000, and there’s all different kinds of complaints, concerns expressed by Biden EPA officials saying, ‘executive salaries appear excessive.’ Another added that ‘senior management salaries are seemingly high without justification.’”
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Abrams was a senior counsel for Rewiring America, which advocates moving homes away from fossil fuel usage. She does not appear to have been tied to the Biden EPA grant, and her time as counsel ended last year.
Zeldin also pointed to Appalachian Community Capital, which got about $500 million from the fund in 2023 and spent under $4.5 million so far — “another example of very small NGOs, very limited experience, getting large sums of money,” as he told Devine.
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“A reviewer, a Biden EPA official — not a Trump political appointee, a Biden official — notes that Appalachian Community Capital plans to use $215 million to finance 600 zero-emission vehicles, and $105 million to finance 700 charging stations,” Zeldin said.
“For those at home doing the math, and this is a quote from the Biden EPA official, ‘This is $358,333 per EV vehicle,’ the reviewer wrote, adding that $150,000 per charging station ‘seems too high.’” he continued.
Congress had created the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to boost green energy initiatives across the country. The $7 billion not included in the “slush fund” is going toward a “Solar for All” initiative that will begin later this year.
But Zeldin was unsure where much of the $20 billion had gone thus far.
“You can ask me 10, 15, 20 of the first most important questions that come to mind as far as where the money was going after it leaves the pass-through entities. And the crazy thing is how little I would be able to answer, even today,” he said.
Zeldin moved to cancel the outstanding climate grants back in March, triggering litigation from affected nonprofits.
“DOJ and FBI would be the ones to answer any questions as far as criminality,” he said. “There was, by far, way too much waste and abuse as a systemic programmatic issue, where we had to take action quickly, which we were happy to do.”
Zeldin stressed that he doesn’t want to take “money from a left-wing activist group and give it to a right-wing activist group. He said he just wants to make sure taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.
“I think that the American public are, they’re fed up with the bulls—t,” he said bluntly. ” And they want people in government to fight for them, to be a good steward of their tax dollars, and they don’t want to get gaslit by congressional Democrats.”
