After the revelations of now-defunct USAID and other US federal agencies funding dubious organisations, including leftist media and individuals across the world, it has emerged that the Biden administration paid over $20 billion to various environmental groups. Most of these NGOs were founded just months before the Presidential elections last year.
The New York Post reported that in one such case, former Vice President Kamala Harris gave a cheque of $7 billion to Maryland-based group Climate United Fund in April 2024. This outfit was founded in December 2023, however, it does not appear in the IRS’s charities database and has no federal filings. While the Climate United Fund announced that it secured a $6.97 billion cheque from Kamala Harris, there was no publicly published accounting of how it plans to spend the $7 billion, the NY Post reported.
Climate United Fund did announce a few projects including a $10.8 million “pre-development loan” solar project on Tribal lands in eastern Oregon and Idaho and a $32m solar energy project at the University of Arkansas, however, the funds allocated to these projects is minuscule in front of the vast funding the group secured from the former Vice President.
Speaking about this, Laurie Styron, CEO of Charity Watch, an independent charity watchdog group, told the NY Post, “Ethically speaking, it’s concerning. What was the purpose of creating middlemen entities when there are so many established groups in the climate space with good track records? What was the value-added in [by] doing it this way, especially with such large sums of taxpayer funds?”
The NY Post report stated that cash for the charity came from a huge $370 billion climate slush fund of taxpayer money overseen by political consultant John Podesta. He was the chair of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 bid for president and White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton. Back in 2022, then-President Joe Biden appointed John Podesta as the US climate envoy. He served as the Senior Advisor to the President for International Climate Policy.
In December 2024, US’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA) advisor Brent Efron was caught revealing how the agency hastily parcelled out a related $20 billion climate fund that was held by Citibank before the end of the Biden administration and Trump assuming office.
“Get the money out as fast as possible before they [Trump Administration] come in … it’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” Efron said.
On Monday (3rd March), the new EPA head Lee Zeldin said that he would bring back the money apported to the climate fund. Zeldin has directed the agency’s inspector general to investigate.
Much like the Climate United Fund, there is one NGO named Justice Climate Fund which was founded in 2023 and has yet to submit tax filings with IRS. However, this NGO has received $940 million from the EPA. It lists its aims as working with “community partners” to “drive transformative investments, focused on reducing pollution,” among other goals, the NY Post reported.
Similarly, Power Forward Communities Inc., was registered in 2023 and shows a total of just $100 in revenue in its tax filing for that year and yet it managed to receive $2 billion from the EPA fund.
Notably, while Power Forward Communities said that it is a part of a coalition of charities including United Way World Wide and Rewiring America which has links to Democrat representative Stacey Abrams, was registered as a corporate entity a year later in Delaware in December 2024.
As the details of the Biden administration funding newly-created climate groups emerged, the FBI and the Justice Department under the Trump administration have launched an investigation and frozen the linked bank accounts wherein billions of dollars of EPA-allocated funds are kept.
