Biden’s ‘Gold Bars’ Went To Politically-Connected Orgs Over Internal Red Flags, Watchdog Finds
- June 17, 2025
Audrey Streb, Daily Caller
Federal reviewers internally raised red flags about a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that awarded billions with minimal oversight to politically-connected green groups, according to a Tuesday report published by Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), a watchdog organization.
Reviewers scrutinized several of the grant applications for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), the EPA program that awarded $20 billion to green groupsconnected to Democrat donors and insiders, identifying concerns such as “excessive” executive pay, curious financial statements and limited oversight, according to documents first obtained by The Free Press and additional findings uncovered and compiled in PPT’s new report. The GGRF budget far exceeded any budget in all of EPA’s history, and the PPT report argues that the program was not administered with appropriate levels of oversight.
“For a program that was given more money to hand out than the EPA has ever had in its entire budget, it would be reasonable for the American public to expect that it would have been operated without the slightest hint of conflict or questions about the recipients,” Michael Chamberlain, director of PPT, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Knowing what EPA leadership did following receipt of these critical assessments, one is left to wonder whether they decided wasteful spending while lacking the resources and any genuine plans to prevent abuse and fraud was merely the cost of doing business to avoid leaving it to a potential Trump administration.”
The GGRF is being investigated by the EPA’s inspector general, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI for potential fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has pointed to the program as an example of waste on the Biden administration’s watch on numerous occasions. Zeldin has often referenced a video covertly recorded by conservative activist group Project Veritas, in which a Biden EPA official likened the agency’s rush to get program funding out the door before the arrival of a new administration to tossing “gold bars off the Titanic.”