Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.
After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.
The Justice Climate Fund is not the only nonprofit newcomer suddenly made rich by the GGRF. Within a month of gaining nonprofit status from the IRS, Power Forward Communities, which reported 2023 revenues of $100, was awarded $2 billion.
The awards were made by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is new to the world of major grantmaking. The agency acknowledges it has never handed out such gigantic sums of money, and its inspector general told Congress last month it marked a “fantastically complex” and “unusual” setup that his small staff would be hard-pressed to follow.
Critics note that many of the awardees are run by politically connected figures. The single biggest winner in the awards, which were announced in April, was the Climate United Fund, which is slated to receive $6.97 billion. The fund’s directors include prominent Democrats, such as Phil Angelides, a former California State Treasurer. After this article was published Climate United told RCI that Anthony Foxx, who served as Transportation Secretary in the Obama administration, was “listed as a board member for our [grant] application but did not commit to serving post award.” A press release on the group’s website names Foxx as a member of its “Inaugural Board of Directors.”
The unprecedented nature of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created as part of 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, is raising concerns about the Biden administration’s efforts to spend tens of billions of dollars in its final months, a gusher of taxpayer money that will flow into a poorly understood, untested, and difficult to audit format. The tremendous sums involved, the novelty of the program, and the EPA’s lack of experience in the field, as well as the unproven track record of some of the newly hatched recipients, have drawn the attention of lawmakers and others uncertain about how the taxpayers’ billions will ultimately be spent and who will keep track of it all.
“These groups are political front groups that are simply created to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to Democrat campaigns under the guise of doing something good”