Beege had 'questions' yesterday. The answers are coming into view -- boosted by DOGE, and will be accelerated by audits everywhere else.

Both DOGE and new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin dug up $20 billion in slush-fund spending through this agency, handed to bureaucrats ostensibly to push Joe Biden's Green New Deal agenda. Ten percent of that money came to Stacey Abrams' non-profit Power Forward Communities in April 2024, part of that $20 billion tranche earmarked for the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program. 

Only seven other groups got funds from the GGRF, and Power Forward Communities' grant was nearly inexplicable, as the Free Beacon's Thomas Catenacci reported on Wednesday:

Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late 2023 and never managed anywhere near the grant's dollar figure—it reported just $100 in total revenue during its first three months in operation, according to its latest tax filings. ...

In its only press release to date, Power Forward Communities said that, in addition to induction stoves, it would use the $2 billion received from the EPA to help install heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, solar panels, home battery systems, EV chargers, and weatherization upgrades.

"For an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant—it doesn't just fly in the face of common sense, it's out and out fraud," Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, alleged in an interview with the Free Beacon.

Yes, and it's a fraud with a purpose. Catenacci dug further into Power Forward Communities and discovered that while it still hasn't announced any specific projects with the $2 billion windfall from Biden, it has created some interesting partnerships. Two of them are non-profits founded by Abrams herself, the Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count, both of which Abrams founded after losing to Brian Kemp in 2018. SEAP is funded by the progressive-activist Tides Center, according to Influence Watch. 

Abrams also serves on the board of another non-profit, Climate Power, along with teachers-union chief Randi Weingarten. Somehow, Climate Power found $55 million to promote Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. At least for now, no one has connected the dots between the $2 billion in one of Abrams' organizations to the $55 million that went into campaigning for Kamala Harris. But the $20 billion went to a lot of left-wing political activists, and as Catenacci points out, the Biden administration did its best to keep it from any scrutiny:

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government's oversight of the program.

That's no accident. Biden -- or whoever was pulling the Weekend At Bernie's act at the White House -- deliberately chose to shield this money from accountability. That speaks to motive and intent, and I doubt very seriously that this only applies to the "Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund." For just two other examples, the Biden administration got $42 billion for broadband expansion without ever linking a single house to the Internet, and $7.5 billion to build EV charging stations, with fewer than 50 installed. 

This is a racket, and it's been done before -- in Canada. Three decades ago, their parliament created the Sponsorship Program to deal gently with separatist sentiment in Quebec. They poured at least $100 million (Canadian) into sponsoring cultural events and running advertising. However, investigations later showed that a lot of that money ended up benefiting cronies of the governing Liberal Party:

By the early spring of 2002, then prime minister Jean Chrétien was forced to address the issue. The Globe and Mail – under the Access to Information Act – tried to find out why the government paid $550,000 to advertising firm Groupaction Marketing for a report that could not be found. No one at Public Works or the company could explain it. 

Chrétien asked federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser to see what she could find out. She learned enough to launch a full investigation – and to ask the RCMP to get involved as well. ...

She found that $100 million was paid to a variety of communications agencies in the form of fees and commissions and said the program was basically designed to generate commissions for these companies rather than to produce any benefit for Canadians.

Public Works officials "broke just about every rule in the book" when it came to awarding contracts to Groupaction, which was paid millions doing work for the government under the sponsorship program, Fraser said.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is simply a new and perhaps more sophisticated version of Adscam. (Full disclosure: I played a small role in publicizing the corruption in Adscam in 2005 at my previous blog, Captain's Quarters.)  Just in these three programs alone, $70 billion in just two years has disappeared with very little to show for it, and that money had to go into someone's pockets. Lo and behold, from the money we can still track, it all disappeared into the pockets of Democrat Party cronies and activists, and arguably some of it came back to fund Kamala Harris' campaign. 

This is precisely why we need DOGE, and why it could force the same kind of accountability that belatedly arrived in Canada for a much smaller scale of corruption. We need to claw back all of this money, force the return of oversight to the federal agencies, and start forcing the recipients to testify in Congress as to where the money went. Taxpayers have been robbed blind while unknowingly funding the radical Left, and accountability has to be imposed -- as soon as we know the true scale of this American Adscam.