Biden Ag Secretary dropped $100K for climate conference in waning days of admin: FOIA docs

Biden Ag Secretary dropped $100K for climate conference in waning days of admin: FOIA docs

  • April 28, 2025

Steven Richards, Just the News

Biden Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his delegation spent over $100,000 in taxpayer funds to attend a United Nations climate conference in the waning days of their administration to tout an already-enacted, billion-dollar spending initiative on “climate crisis.”

Vilsack led the 14-member delegation to Baku, Azerbaijan, for the conference, known as COP29, in late November 2024.

According to documents obtained by outside watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust and shared with Just the News, the junket cost a total $103,881, with Vilsack personally racking up $19,274 in expenses over the five days.

“A personal tab of $20,000 would raise eyebrows in Paris or London, but in Azerbaijan? And why did the USDA need 13 staffers to accompany Vilsack at the conference when you can be sure there were already dozens of EPA and State Department representatives there?” the group’s director, Michael Chamberlain, told Just the News.

Vilsack traveled to Baku to tout the Biden administration’s significant climate investments – domestically and abroad – that have come with whopping price tags, part of the wider spending in the hundred-billion dollar Inflation Reduction Act.

“Vilsack highlighted four years of progress and historic investments made under the Biden-Harris Administration to position U.S. agriculture and forestry as climate leaders, develop innovative climate solutions and build climate-smart markets to provide new revenue streams for rural communities,” a department press release for the trip read.

In total, the department invested about $40 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act, Vilsack said. Specifically, the secretary pointed toward his department’s $4 billion investment in a joint U.S.-United Arab Emirates partnership called AIM for Climate to invest in “climate-smart agriculture.”

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