The Trump admin accuses EPA of squirreling away $20 billion in ‘gold bars.’ Here’s what’s really going on.

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — Shortly after being sworn in as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin accused the previous administration of stashing $20 billion worth of “gold bars” in a Citibank account and vowed to claw the money back to the Treasury.

The new environment chief has frequently touted a theory, spurred by a video from right-wing activist group Project Veritas, that the Biden administration unlawfully awarded $20 billion to progressive ventures. In that video, a Biden-era EPA employee compared the rush to get Congress’s climate law funding out the door before Trump took office to tossing gold bars off the Titanic.

“It’s a clear-cut case of waste and abuse,” Zeldin told Fox News in February. “The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal. We found the gold bars; we want them back.”

In reality, the “gold bars” are congressionally appropriated funds from a 2022 climate law, meant to be distributed to small, nonprofit lenders that focus on energy efficiency and clean energy projects — several of which are in Republican-led states.

The EPA froze and subsequently terminated the $20 billion program soon after President Donald Trump took office, leaving dozens of projects in limbo. They include some that intended to set up solar power for churches, and others to help small independent grocery stores upgrade their aging refrigeration systems — cost savings for the business itself and the customers it serves.

Zeldin’s allegations of criminal activity have risen to the level of Trump’s Department of Justice and the FBI, prompting the resignation of a top DC prosecutor who refused to open a grand jury investigation in the matter in part because she didn’t believe there was enough evidence to do so, CNN previously reported.

As the government continues to spend time and taxpayer money on the investigation, the funding remains frozen. A federal judge recently ruled the Trump administration has not yet provided enough evidence to justify the freeze and took improper steps to cancel the funding.

An EPA spokesperson pointed CNN to a March 18 statement from Zeldin in response to that court ruling, saying the terminated grants were “riddled with self-dealing and wasteful spending” and vowing to “not rest” until the funding had been returned to the US Treasury. The EPA spokesperson also declined to comment on pending litigation.

For the organizations that were set to receive and distribute the money, the accusations from Zeldin don’t add up, and cloud the money’s purpose.

“There are people on the ground who need help,” said Alex Crowley, executive director of the Indiana Energy Independence Fund, a nonprofit lender in Indiana that was set to receive funding. “We are apolitical. We have real people with real economic challenges, with real job opportunities or lack thereof.”

Nonprofit clean energy lenders across the country, in red and blue states alike, were key recipients of the allocated climate funding. In the US, these lenders range from fully fledged state entities to small nonprofits with a goal of using public and private dollars to finance clean energy, efficiency and building upgrade projects.

Crowley’s fund helped an independent grocery store swap its equipment for more efficient models and has similar projects waiting for financing.

“We in Indiana are pretty practical,” Crowley said. “While there’s going to be some benefits from a greenhouse gas reduction perspective, the majority of people are trying to make practical decisions on how to save money. There’s inflation that everyone’s feeling.”

The EPA’s attempts to claw back the funding and the subsequent court battles have thrown the future of such loan programs into limbo.

Nonprofit lenders say the program was structured with maximum oversight, with state organizations following rigorous reporting requirements that would be made public once funding was dispersed. A former EPA staffer involved in implementing the program also recently told CNN the program contained rigorous oversight processes.

“Processes were in place to make sure that everything was transparent, crossing every ‘t,’ dotting every ‘i,’” said Melissa Malkin-Weber, co-director of the North Carolina Clean Energy Fund. Her fund, like similar organizations in several other states, was supposed to receive $10 million from the Coalition for Green Capital — one of the nonprofits currently suing the EPA to recover its funding.

“Everybody’s ready to open their books any time that we’re asked to show what are you doing with this money.”

Filling a financial void for communities

Nonprofit clean energy lenders loan capital to churches, small businesses, or sometimes to individual homeowners that struggle to get loans from traditional banks to upgrade their buildings. Their lending works to fill a financial void.

“If you’re a small rural school and you don’t have a bond rating or you’re a little stretched, that’s when you bring public money to bear,” Malkin-Weber said. “We’re not making loans in areas where there’s well-developed set of lending because we don’t need to be there. We’re coming in to do projects that don’t get done otherwise.”

That’s because energy efficiency or renewable energy projects typically have longer schedules for paying back a loan, meaning traditional banks are hesitant to pony up the financing, according to John Harris, president of the Missouri Green Banc, which since 2017 has financed about $100 million of clean energy and energy efficiency projects, even without EPA funding.

Even in a deeply Republican state, there is fierce demand for his organization’s financing, Harris said.

“The demand exceeds our ability to meet it,” he said. “The market speaks for itself.”

Congress passed the $20 billion into law in 2022 to help fund state-level clean energy lenders, but the full value — when public funding is leveraged with private capital — could be far greater, experts say.

“This isn’t a $20 billion program; this is a $150 billion program that the EPA is currently sitting on,” said Sam Ricketts, co-founder of consulting firm S2 Strategies, which helps connect states with federal funding.

In Georgia, the EPA funding was slated to help churches put solar on their roofs and make community buildings more resilient to extreme weather, so they could serve as a place of shelter for residents during floods and heatwaves.

In North Carolina, funding is going to loans to help Hurricane Helene survivors harden their homes and install solar and battery packs to help the lights stay on in future storms.

Nonprofit lenders in these states and others won’t shut down just because EPA’s funding is frozen. But it does mean they won’t be able to finance as many projects to help small businesses and residents reduce energy bills and bring down their cost of living.

“Clean energy finance is not something that’s radical,” Harris said. “If there are concerns about transparency they should be addressed with oversight or governance. Freezing this kind of money and impact – this is committed public investment, and I think vagueness harms public trust more than it restores it.”

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