Politico Wonders: What Happened to $50 Billion in Biden’s ‘Green New Deal’?

You know what they say — a billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking about real money. Now multiply that by 49-plus, and that’s just in two of Joe Biden’s urgent “green energy” programs in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan.

Biden demanded and got $42 billion for his rural broadband expansion program. Somewhat more infamously, Biden also demanded and got $7.5 billion to create a network of charging stations for electric vehicles, in support of his mandate to replace internal-combustion vehicles in the near future. What did we get for all that cash? Politico decided to count up the progress from these progressive boondoggles, and only managed to find 47 new charging stations.

No … really:

Throughout 2024, POLITICO’s “Biden’s Billions” series has documented the halting pace, uneven progress and genuine economic impact of a spending blueprint rivaling Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. With just weeks left in Biden’s term, it’s not at all certain his legacy will endure in the same way.

Much of it remains a work in progress.

No, much of it remains a work project for progressives. With apologies to Winston Churchill, never has so much been spent by so many for so little:

A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household.

Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.

And you thought your cable company was slow! Comcast and Spectrum look like the Road Runner in comparison to Uncle Joe’s Broadband Service. How does Congress send $42 billion to the White House in 2021 and not have one single household connected to broadband by now? Not one. Had the White House just used the money to buy Starlink subscriptions, that could have funded at least several million households in the past couple of years. 

Forty-two billion dollars. That money went somewhere over the last couple of years. Where did it go, and how much is left? The new Congress had better start asking those questions and getting answers under oath, because there’s a fair chance that this administration used it as back-door subsidies for political allies and donors. For those who don’t recall Canada’s Adscam, here’s the thumbnail version of that scandal: The Liberals used funds meant to promote unity in Quebec as a slush fund for the Liberal Party, through corrupt contracting and outright graft.

At least Canadians did get a few cultural events and ad campaigns from Adscam, with the eventual grift coming to $100 million. Not one home in America got connected to the Internet after $42 billion disappeared into the Biden Administration. 

The fudning for electric charging stations has been more of a high-profile issue this year. Back in May, Pete Buttigieg tried to explain the failure to build more than “seven or eight” stations in the three-plus years that his Department of Transportation had $7.5 billion:

Pete Buttigieg has a VERY tough time trying to explain why “only 7 or 8 [electric vehicle] charging stations have been produced with the $7.5 BILLION investment that taxpayers made back in 2021” pic.twitter.com/ajxWUl69R1

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 26, 2024

After that, the White House got shamed into stepping up installations, and … they still only added 40 more in the following seven months. At that rate, the US would have only added 412 new charging stations “by the end of the decade,” rather than the 500,000 Buttigieg promises here. It would take nearly 7,000 new charging stations per month to meet that goal. And you’d better believe Team Biden or Team Harris would have demanded more money in between, too.

However, that’s a tangent. The real question is again this: Where did the money go? It didn’t just sit around collecting interest in CDs. These programs were actively funded and supposedly in full operation — just without any tangible results. Could that just be incompetence? Possibly, but that money went somewhere. And with President Twenty LLCs at the top of that pyramid, no one should put aside the potential that this money will get used over the next several years by his allies for their own purposes, which likely would be to secure even more graft in the future. 

And that’s just two programs. Let’s dig into the rest as well.