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House lawmakers sharply criticized the head of the Department of Energy’s green energy loan program for not releasing documents requested by a committee looking into companies that have received taxpayer dollars. “It is disconcerting that the executive director of a major government program is unwilling to commit — to actually commit — to providing all the documents that an investigation committee of the Congress has requested,” California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher .. told Mark McCall, the head of the DOE’s loan office, in a hearing Thursday, “and that the answer being given is using weasel words ... House committee members...

A top Nissan official has said the company was “arrogant” in its marketing and sales approach for the all-electric Leaf, which received a $1.4 billion stimulus loan guarantee fromPresident Obama’s Department of Energy. Not that the company is going to return taxpayers their money, since the premise upon which Nissan received the loan were ridiculously high production estimates. Too much in expenses would have to be eaten otherwise. “We were a little bit arrogant as a manufacturer when we went to the 50-state rollout,”said Al Castignetti, Nissan’s vice president for sales, to Automotive News in late November. “We had assumed...

Solar panel installer SolarCity said on Friday it was the second company in as many days that will not get finalization of U.S. government loan aid by a September 30 deadline. The Department of Energy informed SolarCity of its inability to close the loan 48 hours ago, blaming increased paperwork resulting from a Congressional investigation into the Department of Energy's $535 million loan guarantee awarded to bankrupt solar company Solyndra, SolarCity said in a letter to the Republican lawmakers heading the probe.The DOE loan guarantee program, which is under fire for missing signs its first recipient of loan aid, Solyndra,...

Here we go again: another gigantic taxpayer-funded loser, courtesy of President Obama's administration -- and this one seems to have helped friends of Harry Reid. Eric Lipton and Clifford Kraus of the New York Times cover the tale: In a remote desert spot in northern Nevada, there is a geothermal plant run by a politically connected clean energy start-up that has relied heavily on an Obama administration loan guarantee and is now facing financial turmoil. The company is Nevada Geothermal Power, which like Solyndra, the now-famous California solar company, is struggling with debt after encountering problems at its only operating...

Obama Fundraiser Llnked To Loan Program That Aided Solyndra The revelation is likely to spur new inquiries about the solar company's political influence. Separately, California lawmakers seek investigation of a state tax break the firm received. By Matea Gold and Stuart Pfeifer September 17, 2011 The White House faced mounting political complications as a second top fundraiser for President Obama was linked to a federal loan guarantee program that backed a now-bankrupt Silicon Valley solar energy company, and as two California lawmakers called for investigations of a state tax break granted to the firm. Steve Spinner, who helped monitor the...

There's encouraging news on that other Washington effort to force Americans into a government-run system. The White House plan to drive private lenders out of the market for student loans is igniting a backlash on campus and Capitol Hill. the administrators have been afraid to speak as the Department of Education pressured them to drop private lenders and embrace the department's own Direct Lending (DL) program. The pending bill, which has passed the House but is stalled in the Senate, would ban private lenders from making federally guaranteed loans after July 1, 2010. Congress has already enacted regulations in recent...

WASHINGTON - Roughly $1 of every $5 in loans the Small Business Administration directly made to companies hurt by the Sept. 11 attacks has fallen into default, leaving the government with an uphill effort to recover millions of dollars in taxpayer money. The agency is just now learning about the magnitude of businesses that went under or stopped making payments. Its Sept. 11 direct disaster loan program often gave recipients two years before their first payments were due, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press. The SBA directly lent $1.2 billion to more than 10,000 companies that made specific...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress will investigate the "flagrant abuse" of a federal loan program designed to help businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks and make sure such problems don't occur with Hurricane Katrina relief, a key Senate Republican announced Friday. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, announced the investigation in response to an Associated Press story Thursday that showed the federal program was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief or even know they were getting it. "The apparent widespread abuse of loans provided through the Supplemental Terrorist Activity Relief Act is nothing short of an outrage," Snowe said. The committee chairwoman said she would demand answers from both the banks that gave the loans and the Small Business Administration, which supervised the program. "Congress must seek and find answers when confronted with a situation that represents a possible betrayal of the public trust especially at a time when the people of the Gulf Region need every resource available to recover," Snowe said. "...I intend to exert my oversight power to determine how such flagrant abuse could happen and to ensure that Small Business Administration loans truly go to those who need them." Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the committee's top Democrat, joined in the call for an investigation. "This was a deliberate attempt to cover up White House budget gimmicks that left the SBA's largest loan program underfunded and on the brink of shutting down," Kerry said. "The administration asked SBA employees to bend the rules and steer regular loans through the program aimed at helping businesses impacted by 9/11." The AP reported Thursday that businesses as diverse as Dunkin' Donuts shops and motorcycle dealers far from New York and Washington got loans drawn without their knowledge by their banks from the Sept. 11 program. AP quoted several business owners as saying they hadn't been hurt by the attacks and were embarrassed to learn their loans came from the program. And banking officials and SBA documents show the SBA encouraged lenders to give out the low-interest, government guaranteed loans using the loosest interpretation of the rules. Meanwhile, a poll taken shortly before the story was published showed that nearly three quarters of Americans believe the government did a good job helping the economy recover from Sept. 11. An AP-Ipsos poll found there was general satisfaction with the economic relief efforts from Congress and the Bush administration among people in all gender, race, educational and age categories. When last week's poll participants were interviewed and told about AP's findings about the loan program, some said the program seemed misguided to give away valuable aid so broadly. "It's not necessarily what I would have done," said Nancy Hannaford, a Santa Clara, Calif., tutor and Web designer. "Nobody bailed everyone here out during the dot-com bust." Overall, 27 percent of those surveyed said the government had done a very good job, and 45 percent said a somewhat good job, on the recovery. Twenty-seven percent said they believed had done a somewhat poor or very poor job on the economic recovery. Young Americans, unmarried people and Democrats were less approving of the response, while older Americans, married people and Republicans were more likely to approve. The poll of 998 adults was conducted Aug. 30-Sept. 1 by Ipsos, an international polling firm, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The economic toll from the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings has been estimated to be as high as $639 billion and to have cost 2 million jobs, according to a New York Senate panel study. The federal government responded with billions of dollars in loans and grants from numerous programs and agencies. It also launched the largest federal reorganization in a half century, merging 22 agencies to create the Department of Homeland Security, which will spend approximately $47 billion this year. David Seratto, an Orange County animal control officer, said one of the government's better responses to the attacks was taking over security at all U.S. airports, returning confidence to flying. "You're safer when you're flying now," he said. "It's inconvenient, but it's a necessary inconvenient."</p>