RUTHFULLY YOURS

For Democrats, green policies are a blunt object to be used for taking down capitalism and controlling the economy. They are also a magnificent vehicle for graft. It’s encouraging to see the Trump administration cracking down on the latter.

As his last days in the White House were nearing, Joe Biden, or whoever controlled his autopen, handed out $100 billion in loans and other financial commitments to bolster what’s been called the “Green New Deal wish list.” The funds were dispersed by the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office in the 76 days after Kamala Harris lost the election. To understand how extraordinary and suspicious this was, that same office distributed a little more than $40 billion in its first 15 years of existence, says Energy Secretary Christopher Wright.

“If those were great ideas that were a benefit to America, why didn’t they do it in the two-and-one-half years after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed?” Wright asked last week on a Fox Business segment with Maria Bartiromo. “Why did they wait until they lost the election? They changed terms and loan covenants. They basically tried to set bombs to make it hard for us to unwind the mess they created.”

The answer, which Wright knows, is that it was an act of sabotage but primarily a grift. Democrats are well seasoned in doling out taxpayers’ money to favored groups. There’s no need to think back any further than a couple of months ago when the new administration began to root out the racket known as the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has propped up the Democratic political machine and has the appearance of a criminal organization.

On its way out, the Biden administration also “parked” $20 billion “at an outside financial institution,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said in February. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”

It appears the $20 billion was part of the Biden plan to toss “gold bars off the Titanic” to get money to the “right people” before Biden had to leave the White House. Zeldin promised his office would “review every penny that has gone out the door.”

“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said.

Of course, we can backtrack a bit further.

The Obama administration gifted billions to green grifters. The most infamous black hole of green money is Solyndra, a $500 million flop that “never produced any energy to speak of before it went bankrupt,” says our friend Stephen Moore. The company went bust a little more than a year after Barack Obama made his much-publicized visit to the company’s Fremont, California, headquarters.

“The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra,” Obama said during his media-hyped drop-in, while also proclaiming, “The future is here.”

Even after the Solyndra debacle unraveled, the Obama White House kept feeding green programs and recipients aligned with the Democratic Party.

To be fair, the second Bush administration also granted volumes of taxpayers’ dollars for green schemes that had no practical purpose.

The current Republican White House, however, seems determined to end what is best described as a hustle that steals from taxpayers. During the Bartiromo interview, Wright said the Trump administration “stepped into a lot of mess, but this stuff’s all fixable. We’ve got an aggressive team going after it.”

That was followed up on Tuesday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s moving forward with legislation to claw back, reports Politico, “billions of dollars in unspent funds from the Democrats’ 2022 climate law.”

Washington will always be corrupt, and the green charlatanry will be around as long as the money flows freely. We know Donald Trump can’t end it, but he can at least put a stop to it for now and leave his own “bomb” to make it more difficult to chisel taxpayers in the future.