Climate United 'Slush Fund' is Now Subject of 'Ongoing Criminal Investigation'
"The 'Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund' program is now the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation."
If you haven’t been following the Climate United Fund scandal, then buckle up, because it’s one hell of an electric vehicle ride on the corruption superhighway.
In a major update, it was reported today that the "Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund" program was the subject of an “ongoing criminal investigation,” per Julie Kelly.
The FBI recommended placing a 30-day administrative freeze on eight slush fund recipients in light of “credible information” of possible criminal violations.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called for the financial agreement with Citibank be terminated and the grant funds immediately returned.
The EPA Inspector General has opened an investigation. Further, as Zeldin reported last night on X, he has terminated all agreements with the grant recipients--so-called climate "nonprofits" including one started by Stacey Abrams last year.
If you’re not up to speed, here are the basics on this developing scandal. The green slush funds the Biden administration hastily disbursed before exiting stage left were among $370 billion overseen by Clinton hatchetman John Podesta.
As will be discussed below, one of the most scandalous aspects of the Climate United Fund scandal is that it is tied to foreign interests, and potentially, China.
In April 2024, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) awarded nearly $7 billion to a newly formed nonprofit called the Climate United Fund (CUF).
This hastily constructed nonprofit with deep Democratic ties, little transparency, and a vague spending plan was somehow able to obtain the largest grant of its kind. The founders of this “popup NGO shell” claim it was intended to support “clean energy initiatives.”
Climate United Fund’s actual purpose appears to be Democrat insiders looting taxpayers for billions of dollars.
Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business sounded the alarm:
This is disturbing – Biden and Obama Democrats created a new beast, the “popup nonprofit shell” they suddenly launch to take in your taxpayer money supposedly for things like climate change and illegal immigration. Major front for taxpayer abuse with accusations of grift growing by the hour. Never saw it like this in decades covering IRS/taxes.
Check out the tax returns for one of these popup NGO shells, the Climate United Fund which got the biggest nonprofit grant in history out of Biden’s massive climate slush funds.
Kamala Harris and Biden’s EPA chief Michael Regan gave $7 billion total to the suddenly created Climate United Fund in April 2024 after it launched just five months earlier in November 30, 2022 when Its tax returns show it started with a tiny $547K in revs.
But it spent a massive $451K of that $547k in just two months in 2023, a quarter of that on legal fees and the majority $323K mysteriously blown on no one knows what because its tax returns don’t say.
As Stephen McIntyre of Climate Audit has noted, “the phrase ‘popup NGO shell’ is a nice one. To be precise, they are structured as a sort of partnership of mostly very substantial underlying NGOs, the officials of whom earn up to $1 million. These underlying NGOs seem to be mainly in the business of loaning federal money while eating up huge overheads.”
After taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump’s new EPA, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, conducted a review of the grant program.
By February, the agency announced a freeze on CUF’s funds, citing financial irregularities and the organization’s lack of experience in handling large-scale climate investments. The EPA also signaled plans to claw back the $7 billion in taxpayer money, pending further investigations into how CUF obtained the grant in the first place.
This move is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to rein in what it calls the “Biden climate slush fund,” a reference to the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created under the Inflation Reduction Act.
The National Clean Investment Fund, in particular, has been tied to three of these alleged “slush funds”:
Climate United Fund - Award Amount: $6,970,000,000
Coalition for Green Capital - Award Amount: $5,000,000,000
Power Forward Communities - Award Amount: $2,000,000,000
The Trump administration credibly argues that these funds have been used to funnel money into Democratic-aligned organizations with almost no oversight.
Climate United Files Lawsuit to Unfreeze Funds
In response to the freeze, Climate United Fund has filed a lawsuit against the EPA and Citibank, which had been managing the grant funds. CUF claims that the Trump administration is unlawfully blocking funds that were legally awarded and that this action is putting key climate projects at risk.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, incredibly enough, has been brought before Judge Tanya Chutkan.
CUF argues that Citibank is improperly withholding funds at the direction of the Trump administration and that the EPA is violating administrative law by reversing a legally binding grant agreement.
As Julie Kelly reported:
A lawsuit filed yesterday by newly-formed Climate United--headed by former Obama aide Beth Bafford and stacked with Dem activists--that received $7 billion from Biden EPA's climate slush fund confirms Citibank has frozen disbursements to the fund…
Every time I dig into this scandal, it gets worse. As @epaleezeldin disclosed last month, Biden's EPA "parked" $20 billion at Citi in November 2024--a first of its kind arrangement clearly intended to keep funds away from GOP Congress and potential Trump White House.
Climate United is seeking a temporary restraining order against EPA and Citi to force the bank to dole out the funds (our tax money, obviously). Case is before Judge Tanya Chutkan.
CUF is a coalition of three nonprofit lending institutions: Calvert Impact Capital, the Community Preservation Corporation, and the Self-Help Credit Union.
While CUF claims its coalition members have managed more than $30 billion in private capital, financial statements suggest that their actual assets are far lower.
CUF’s leadership has strong ties to Democratic operatives. CEO Beth Bafford previously worked in the Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget and was a regional field director for Obama’s presidential campaign. Other key figures linked to CUF include former California Democratic Party Chairman Phil Angelides, Obama’s Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, and Congressional Black Caucus ally Patrice Willoughby.
Additionally, part of CUF’s $7 billion was allocated to Power Forward Communities, a nonprofit linked to Stacey Abrams, which received $2 billion under the same climate initiative. Power Forward, like CUF, is experiencing its own scandal: It appears to have funneled taxpayer money to the Kamala Harris campaign.
China Connection?
This is where it gets real interesting.
Calvert Impact announced in 2024 that it was among the recipients of the massive grant in the National Clean Investment Fund:
Today, Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced a $6.97 billion investment from the National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF) to Climate United, a national nonprofit focused on delivering the benefits of green technologies to communities across the county. The coalition, composed of Calvert Impact, the Community Preservation Corporation (CPC), and Self-Help, was one of several entities competing to manage a portion of the NCIF, one of three programs under the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
The Director Emeritus of Calvert Impact Capital is Wayne Silby.
“Though he is no longer active in most of the day-to-day business of Calvert Investments, he supervises its private equity activities,” the website states.
“Mr. Silby also co-founded Social Venture Network, a group of socially oriented entrepreneurs and investors, and Calvert Social Venture Partners, one of the first socially oriented venture capital funds,” the site adds. “He also started the Emerging Europe Fund for Sustainable Investment, a $60 million OPIC private equity fund focused on Central Europe.”
“Mr. Silby chairs ImpactAssets, a $200 million donor advised fund, and SynTao, Ltd., a CSR consulting firm in Beijing, China,” the website continues. “He has a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.”
Under his leadership, Calvert became a founding investor and adviser to the China Environment Fund in the late 1990s. Silby has held numerous positions that raise questions about the organization's global financial entanglements, including serving as a member of the Bush China Foundation Board of Advisors.
Silby has also played a significant role in Chinese investment initiatives, chairing the China Committee of the Grameen Foundation since 2007 and serving as a founding board member of the China Alliance of Social Value Investors.
Silby also gave a lecture at Tsinghua University, which has been designated “high risk” for its defense research and espionage."
In his lecture on so-called “Social Responsible Investment (SRI),” Tsinghua University gives some background on Mr. Silby:
On April 23, Mr. Wayne Silby kindly accepted our invitation to come and share his thoughts about impact investment. Impact investments are investments in companies, organizations and funds that have the intention to generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact alongside a financial return. Silby is widely regarded as a pioneer of social investing. He co-founded a mutual fund firm, the Calvert Group (now called Calvert Investments) in 1976. In 1982, Silby started the Calvert Social Investment Fund, one of the earliest mutual funds dedicated to socially responsible investments, which has since grown to a $15 billion investment management group. In addition, Siby is one of the founders of the Social Venture Network, the chairman of SynTao in China, and also one of the main supporters of the creation of Net Impact in San Francisco. Indeed, he was very happy to see Net Impact at Tsinghua University.
It should be added that a whole host of Democrat heavy-hitters have aligned itself with Net Impact, including: Alicia Garza, Co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, Sally Jewell, President and CEO of REI; Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia; Tensie Whelan, Executive Director of the Rainforest Alliance; Chad Holliday, CEO of DuPont; Honorable Al Gore, Chairman of Generation Investment Management and former Vice President of the United States; Tom Chappell, CEO and Founder of Tom's of Maine; Gary Erickson, CEO of Clif Bar, Inc.; Andrew Yang, Candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Nomination; and Orin Smith, President and CEO of Starbucks Coffee Company.
Here is the disturbing part. The Washington Examiner reported on Tsinghua University’s reported espionage activities in the context of its relationship to OpenAI:
In 2018, a prestigious Chinese university announced to the world that it intended to harness the power of artificial intelligence to bolster China’s military. Since then, America’s top AI company has hired dozens of its graduates.
Tsinghua University has gone all in on pursuing AI research and development for China’s People’s Liberation Army. You Zheng, one of the university’s vice presidents, went as far as to declare the institution’s enthusiastic involvement in the Chinese Communist Party’s “military-civil fusion” strategy.
Tsinghua University has also been linked to cyber-espionage, according to the Financial Times:
China’s top engineering university, Tsinghua University, was the origin of multiple recent cyber-espionage campaigns targeting groups such as the Tibetan community in India and the Alaskan state government, new research has found.
Calvert Impact Capital may thus be exploiting taxpayer funding that directly or indirectly benefits China’s expanding green energy investments.
Its 2024 Calvert Impact Principles disclosure lays out its funding objectives:
It furthermore directs managers to write a “credible narrative” to justify lending:
Calvert Impact Capital states that it lends to “96 borrowers in a 100+ countries.”
Thus, Calvert Impact is directly involved in foreign investment. It is unclear from searching its strategic plans or disclosure forms if China is among them. It may take an audit of its records to obtain specific information on foreign entities that benefit from Calvert Impact’s lending.
China has been leveraging its dominance in rare earth minerals that are essential for technologies like solar panels. China controls approximately 90% of the global processing capacity for these minerals, making it a critical player in the supply chain.
In 2024, China invested approximately 6.8 trillion yuan ($940 billion) in clean energy sectors, nearing the global fossil fuel investment total of $1.12 trillion. This investment encompasses electric vehicles, batteries, renewable energy manufacturing, power generation, railways, electric grids, storage, and energy efficiency initiatives. Notably, the electric vehicle industry contributed 3 trillion yuan, while solar energy added 2.8 trillion yuan to China's GDP.
U.S. taxpayers may thus be helping to fund China’s green energy ascendancy, while the prior Biden administration’s environmental policies indirectly aided in hindering one of the communist country’s chief competitors.
A New EPA Mandate
Administrator Zeldin has indicated that the EPA will push forward with efforts to reclaim the grant money, arguing that the original approval process lacked transparency and that CUF failed to provide a clear plan for how the funds would be used.
The Trump administration’s review could result in broader investigations into other organizations that received grants under Biden’s climate spending programs. There are growing calls for congressional hearings into the use of these taxpayer funds and whether Biden’s EPA deliberately awarded them to politically connected groups without proper oversight.
Claw it back, investigate and prosecute