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Posted on 08/08/2026 4:58:21 AM PDT by MtnClimber
I recognize that there could be many contenders for the title of the “Most Corrupt Program Ever Enacted.” However, I challenge any reader, or anyone else for that matter, to name any program in the vast federal handout universe more corrupt that the so-called Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that was created by the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, § 60103, and codified at 42 U.S.C. § 7434.
If you have somehow forgotten about this program, it is the one that was the subject of a famous Project Veritas recording, made during the interim between President Trump’s second election in November 2024 and his inauguration in January 2025. In the December 2024 video, an EPA “special advisor” named Brent Efron described a rush in the Biden EPA’s last days to commit huge amounts of funds to friendly non-profits in a way to completely avoid oversight and to make them difficult for the incoming Trump people to claw back. Efron characterized what was going on as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”
Upon entering office, the Trump people set out to and then did identify the funds in question — about $20 billion — and promptly rescinded the grants. Plaintiffs went to the D.C. District Court, and got an injunction mandating disbursement of the funds. Congress then repealed the grants in the One Big Beautiful Bill of July 2025. In September 2025 a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit upheld the rescission of the grants, and held that the only remedy of the grant recipients would be to seek contractual damages in the Court of Claims. A rare victory for the taxpayers? Not so fast. The plaintiff grant recipients asked for en banc review from the entire D.C. Circuit, and on August 4 the full D.C. Circuit mostly re-instated the original District Court injunction mandating distribution of the funds.
The vote of the judges in the D.C. Circuit is almost completely along party lines, and illustrates the extent to which the Democratic-appointed judges will uphold anything, no matter how corrupt, to support their team.
From the beginning, the label of “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” in this statute was the thinnest of cover stories to justify vast handouts to Democratic Party insiders with little to no knowledge, ability, or experience in actually reducing “greenhouse gases.” An EPA page on this subject reveals the extent to which the program was no more than an excuse to hand out billions to party insiders in the waning days of the lame duck administration. The three biggest grant recipients in question, and the amounts of their grants, were: Climate United Fund ($6.97 billion), Coalition for Green Capital ($5.0 billion), and Power Forward Communities ($2.0 billion). Here is some background (from the EPA page) on these three entities:
- “The Coalition for Green Capital had only expended $1.42 million in 2023 before receiving a $5 billion award from EPA.”
- “Power Forward Communities had reported a total of $100 for both “total revenue” and “net assets” in its 2023 tax return – the year before receiving a $2 billion grant from EPA.”
- Climate United Fund’s CEO, Chief Strategy Officer, and multiple board members were high ranking administration officials during the Obama and/or Biden administrations.
- Coalition for Green Capital’s CEO had been a senior advisor at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, before becoming New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Energy Czar.” A senior Biden administration energy advisor left to join the Coalition for Green Energy’s Board as it was applying for its grant.
- Power Forward Communities’ CEO had served as CEO of Fannie Mae during the Obama administration. Multiple other senior executives had also been high ranking officials in the Obama administration.
And there’s plenty more where that comes from.
The initial D.C. Circuit panel decision, written by Judge Naomi Rao, outlines the machinations that the Biden people went through to try to make it as difficult as possible for the incoming Trump administration to claw back the money from the Democrat insiders. Remember as you are reading this that this takes place in December 2024 and January 2025, after Trump has been elected:
The grant agreements have an unusual structure. Typically, grant funds are held by the U.S. Treasury and disbursed incrementally as grantees use the funds for program purposes. EPA structured these grants with a middleman that would hold the funds as a “financial agent” of the United States. According to EPA, this was the first time the federal government used a financial agent, as opposed to Treasury, to carry out this kind of grant program. Treasury entered a Financial Agency Agreement (“FAA”) with Citibank. . . .
The month before President Trump’s inauguration, EPA modified the grant agreements—with no apparent consideration from the grantees—to make it more difficult for the government to terminate the grants. The week before the inauguration, EPA amended the ACAs to require Citibank to “continue to disburse funds” to the grantees, even if the government exercised its right of exclusive control, if the funds are “associated with financial obligations ‘properly incurred’” before the government exercised its right.
The Biden people had tried to make it so that the money would be gone and unrecoverable — like gold bars at the bottom of the ocean — by the time the Trump people figured out what was going on. But new EPA Administrator Zeldin very promptly told Citibank to freeze the money, and then Congress repealed the grants in the OBBB in July 2025.
So what is even the argument that the money must be disbursed at this point? The D.C. Circuit’s en banc ruling is a one-page summary order that does not provide any reasoning. The only place we can look for that is the dissenting opinion from Judge Pillard from the panel decision. Remember that this was issued in September 2025, two months after the OBBB had repealed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. Here are some quotes from Judge Pillard:
Three years ago, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law’s signature provisions directs the Environmental Protection Agency to distribute $20 billion in grants for investment in projects to develop clean energy infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. Congress structured the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to provide jobs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality, especially in low-income and underinvested communities. EPA distributed the grant money by the fall of 2024, as Congress required. . . . Plaintiffs challenge EPA’s action to gut the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund as contrary to the Constitution’s separation of powers. Fundamental to our “constitutional system of separation of powers” is the “settled, bedrock principle[]” that neither the President nor his “subordinate executive agencies” may “decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections.”. . . Yet that is just what EPA decided to do and has begun to effectuate here. The record strongly supports the district court’s determination that EPA has frozen and attempted to repossess billions of dollars’ worth of lawfully spent money for no substantiated reason other than disagreements with Congress’s policy determination—grounds that are entirely inapposite and inadequate, and that the government does not defend here.
Well, it seems rather significant to me that (1) by the time of this decision Congress had actually repealed this funding, and (2) at the time of the decision the money had not been “lawfully spent” by the grantees (who were basically start-ups with no ability to run through these billions in a matter of months), but rather parked at Citibank in a highly unusual arrangement to try to evade all normal oversight, let alone a change of policy by a new administration.
I noted above that the vote of the judges was almost entirely along party lines. The exception was Chief Judge Srinivasan, who joined the three Republican appointees in this paragraph:
Four judges (Chief Judge Srinivasan and Judges Katsas, Rao, and Walker) vote to vacate paragraph two of the preliminary injunction because, among other things, Plaintiffs have not demonstrated that a preliminary injunction against effectuating the March 11, 2025, Notices of Termination remains warranted after the OBBBA’s repeal of Section 60103 of the IRA: Under those judges’ understanding of the repeal, EPA Defendants likely could now take actions to terminate Plaintiffs’ grants without violating Section 60103 of the IRA.
Judge Srinivasan’s name was often mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee for President Biden, but of course when he got the chance Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Manhattan Contrarian ping
So the got their money En Banc?.............
Time for Trump to up the pressure on Citibank so they back out while appealing to SCOTUS.
They got the money ”en stickemuppez-vous”.
This is EXACTLY why the guillotine was the popular fix for the problems in France during the late 1700’s.
The grift just goes round and round.
After the DC circuit courts refused to let the J6 Patriots change their venue from the most biased jury pool in America I’ve been insisting the whole circuit should be dissolved by Congress. ALL of those judges should be tarred ,feathered and run out of DC on a rail. However , given that kind of well deserved treatment has gone out of style, I’d be satisfied with seeing all of them fired .
bttt
Hey Empty Suit JD wake up and write some recission packages. Congress spends the money they can turn it off.
I agree that the circuit, somehow, needs to be gone. Democrats will continue to appoint judges who are activists and beholden to the club. Any corruption or other government legal issues will never favor Republicans, thereby, insuring Democrat rule long-term.
trump is currently pushing for vance behind the scenes. You know an empty suit when you see one of course better than the president.
Astonishing. Not astonishing that Leftist are stupid, immoral, grifting criminals. We all know that.
Astonishing that they know that we know that, and they understand the corruption so well that they feel that something like this could go to some judicial process such as an en banc review, and not be in the least worried that the "gold bars Titanic" quote would be known, and instead of being outraged and being referred to a real criminal prosecution.
In a normal, healthy, moral Republic that would happen. But the Leftists have so engineered the system, filling the courts with Leftists who are willing to simply ignore the criminality, getting so many of their political brethren involved in the grift that nobody wants to stop the gravy train, and capturing the Media to such an extent that they not only WILL NOT report on the grift, but outright lie to cover it up and support it.
Astonishing.
Onward to the Supreme Rogue’s Court... This will be appealed by the great EPA chief Lee Zeldin
Trump is so stupid he just comes out of the blue with this statement about how the party should get behind Vance.
That is the narrative the Left (and some on this forum) put forth, that Trump is stupid, and by extension, those lackeys who work for him (Like Vance) are stupid and lazy.
Someone has an opinion. Everyone has one. Someone who has never watched Trump or Vance at work, who has zero conception of ANY conversations that have taken place between Trump and Vance, Trump and Rubio, and Rubio and Vance, and believes that Trump is just going to come out and off the cuff, verbally support one of them for the 2028 election. Also brands them as lazy, an empty suit, or whatever the Media wants the audience to think on a given day. Just like that.
I am listing to an excellent video by Bill Whittle who explains best the empty headed opinions of people who brand someone like Vance...or Rubio...or...Trump as a stupid, lazy or...an "empty suit".
It is a very entertaining and contextually relevant video (about 15 minutes long-I changed a couple of words in the wrong tense as Scott Ott was reading the anecdote and got them wrong in his relation of the story): 
LINK: Donald Trump: RENAISSANCE MAN
Here is a transcript that describes an anecdote that was related by RFK Jr. about Trump:
RFK Jr.:"...We started talking about troop strength in Syria and Iran and Israel and Jordan. And he's uh he drew...he's got a very beautiful hand. He drew a perfect picture of the Middle East with all the countries, right? And he put the troop strength on every border of all of those countries.
Um, a friend of mine texted me and said he couldn't believe that I was now working for the stupidest man in America.
You know, I believe he's...I used to believe he's kind of superficial. Now that I know him, um, he [Trump] has like an encyclopedic mind. He knows everything. He knows about music. He has these incredible uh eclectic music tastes. He loves music. He loves theater. He knows everything about sports. He can out talk you and you know everything uh about every sport.
And he's talking at the time to a a podcaster I think is into sports. He knows everything about Wall Street, who made their money, how they made the money, what the deals look like..."
Power Forward Communities is composed of Rewiring America, Enterprise Community Partners, and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Those in turn are part of the ActionNetwork.Org which has 12,000 activist non-profits, for-profits, political organizations all of which are intended to build a database for a leftist ground game in elections.
How much of the grant money would be funneled through the chain of organizations to elect the “best” congress critters?
January 22, 2025Mia Layaguin
Manila, Philippines — A bill proposing for a death penalty via firing squad for corrupt government officials was filed before the House of Representatives.
Bkmk
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