Biden Bucks: Climate Change Funds a Bonanza for State Outfits

A RealClearInvestigations search of government data shows that the Colorado Energy Office was just one of many agencies and groups across the country that received exponential increases in federal grants during Biden’s last two years as part of the unprecedented attempt to refashion federal agencies into the finance engines that would transform the U.S. energy sector to a renewable, Net Zero future.

The Treasury Department’s database suggests that after Congress passed the unprecedented funding to fight climate change, it looked for outfits that could disperse that money at the state and local level. In response, it turned to many organizations in the public and private sector with no track record for handling such vast sums, as well as state energy offices and agencies. 

“Biden-era climate policy sometimes prioritized sending money out the door first, and worrying about logistics and oversight second,” said Jeremy Portnoy, an investigator with OpenTheBooks who seeks to make all government spending public. “Money went to groups that were receiving grants larger than they had the capability to manage.”

Although they represent only a sliver of Biden-era spending on green energy, the sudden promise of $9.5 billion in awards to state and county energy programs beginning in FY2024 and the Trump administration efforts to claw back some of that money highlight how shifts in White House policies can make long-term planning hard, especially regarding partisan policy issues.

In response to Trump’s efforts to halt much of the spending, a coalition of 13 Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in February seeking to have all the approved grant money dispensed. They argued the Trump administration unfairly targeted states controlled by Democrats, and that without the money those states’ “ambitious climate goals” may not be reached.

“Since the first day of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, his Administration set out to reverse and undermine the historic energy and infrastructure funding measures enacted by Congress in the preceding years,” according to the lawsuit. “Its true purpose was to give the Administration thin bureaucratic cover to eliminate congressionally established energy and infrastructure programs and rescind their funding, for no other reason than a fundamental disagreement with the programs’ policy underpinnings.”

The legal challenges have scored some successes; last month the Energy Department agreed to reinstate 11 grants, although the largest of them remain in limbo.

Three Huge Beneficiaries

While most states received some portion of the climate splurge, RCI’s analysis focused on three of the biggest beneficiaries: Colorado, California, and New York, which were poised to receive more than $1 billion. 

Like the Colorado Energy Office,  the New York Energy Research and Development Institute and the California Energy Commission were started as energy conservation initiatives in the 1970s when the U.S. was reeling from the oil embargo shock, and the economy’s blood seemed dependent on the wills of foreign actors. In more recent decades, all three have also focused on renewable energy, with a special emphasis on social justice equity. Today, the New York institute has nearly 500 employees with an average salary of $127,220, while the California Commission enjoys regulatory powers over siting energy plants and sets state energy policies.

In addition to state funding and, in New York and California, money from ratepayers, these three state agencies routinely received federal grants for relatively small amounts, according to the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov.

But then Biden’s Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act kicked in, and the Energy Department began to approve enormous sums for the state agencies. The grant bonanza went on for roughly 18 months beginning in 2023 and was capped by a post-election frenzy in December 2024 and January 2025, records show. Suddenly, the three Democratic state agencies were receiving grants 10 or more times bigger than anything they had gotten previously.

An RCI review of the FY2024 data showed both the unprecedented size of the grants and the rapidity with which they were greenlit:

•  The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority got an average of $5.2 million a year in Energy Department grants from 2015 to 2021. In 2024, however, it was slated to receive $335.38 million. Even after Trump’s 2024 election, $30 million was approved in three grants.
• The Colorado Energy Office averaged $6.7 million from 2015 to 2021. Its 2024 grant haul was on top of almost $60 million in fiscal year 2023, and post-2024 election grants to the office were for nearly another $60 million.
• The California Energy Commission averaged $3.1 million for the seven years between 2015 and 2021, a figure that increased by more than a hundred-fold in 2024. After the 2024 election, another $630.5 million grant was approved, one of seven post-election grants.

And the grants came in rapid procession, records show. In California’s case, there were four grants totaling $1.4 billion in the last six months of the 2024 calendar year, while the Energy Department and the EPA combined to greenlight more than $400 million in July and August of that year.

The Treasury Department has rarely disbursed these grants in full. Unlocking that money is the main goal of a February lawsuit brought by the attorneys general. And, as RCI previously reported, totals on usaspending.gov do not always match those from other agencies, reflecting the complexity and scale of federal spending.

But the extraordinary amounts and compressed timeline reflect a blizzard of approved spending that the inspectors general of the respective federal agencies warned would make effective oversight of the money nearly impossible.

Nebulous & Questionable

The grants were designed to pay for tasks such as improving the resilience of the grid in the face of disasters or the integration of renewable energy into the grid, or for reducing methane emissions. Yet another purpose was for programs such as home weatherization, a federal operation dogged by allegations of fraud and shoddy work, as RCI reported in 2022. 

Some of the biggest grants were for nebulous-sounding work. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act was the source of funding “to provide initial guidance for the planning, administration or technical assistance for future distributions of formula awards through the home energy rebate programs.”

Such “initial guidance” would not come cheaply. The Colorado Energy Office was set to get two separate $70 million awards for such work, records show, while the California Energy Commission would get $580 million for the same task and the New York energy institute more than $310 million.

The weatherization of low-income households began with the Obama administration’s 2009 spending bill, and it got a big boost under President Biden. For example, two grants, for $70 million each, were earmarked for the Colorado Energy Office’s weatherization projects in fiscal year 2024, records show. 

As with other stories RCI has done on Biden’s climate change spending, the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment. But current White House officials maintain that the grant binge ended during President Trump’s second term.

“While the Biden administration threw taxpayer dollars at Green New Scam ideological pet projects, the Trump administration is focused on reshoring critical supply chains and safeguarding our national and economic security – all while ensuring the best bargain for taxpayers in every deal,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told RCI.

The Colorado Energy Office declined comment, and NYSERDA did not respond to RCI’s questions about the grants.

The California Energy Commission, on the other hand, said much of the grant money was tied to formula spending, such as “clean energy retrofits” in residential homes.

“California is meeting growing electricity demand by rapidly building out affordable clean energy infrastructure, increasing grid resilience and transmission capacity, and electrifying new and existing buildings with energy efficient appliances that help lower energy bills,” a Commission spokesperson told RCI. “Federal grant funding is critical for California and other states to quickly meet growing energy demand and to do it in the smartest way possible – with clean renewable electricity.”

There was one FY2024 grant to the CEC specifically labeled as “formula;” however, an $11.7 million grant was fully disbursed by Treasury.

New Priorities

In the grand scheme of federal spending, the amounts may not seem huge. They are dwarfed, for instance, in comparison to the grants Washington has made for interstate highways.

“Biden wanted to jumpstart the green energy economy so it’s not surprising to me a couple of billion dollars were spent,” said John Joseph Wallis, an economics professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in public finance. “They just decided to make that a priority, and there are hundreds of examples of that kind of thing over the last century.”

But as the renewable energy grants began to flow, inspectors general at the Energy Department and the EPA warned the unprecedented amounts would make oversight next to impossible.

“The EPA’s inspector general Sean O’Donnell warned Congress that money would be lost to fraud and waste if the EPA went ahead with its plan to spend billions in Inflation Reduction Act funds in a short timeframe, but the money was funneled out anyway,” Portnoy said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has made several moves to reorient the Department toward Trump’s policy goal of increasing affordable and abundant energy, a shift the administration in a first-day executive order labeled “unleashing American energy,” and Wright’s Department calls the “Energy Dominance Financing Program.”

Over the past year and a half, the administration has slashed away at what it considers Biden’s fanciful push toward a Net Zero future. Within two months it had put together a so-called “kill list” of recent renewable energy initiatives, and last October, the administration canceled $7.6 billion in Biden-era energy grants, with White House budget director Russell Vought saying the money had been designed to “fuel the Left’s climate agenda.”

Wright told a House committee last month that politics were not behind cuts at Energy, but the February lawsuit insists that they were, pointing to the hit list drawn up by the Department in 2025. “The list was intended to further the Administration’s goal of eliminating renewable-energy programs created by Congress through the duly-enacted 2021 IIJA and the 2022 IRA – programs the Administration derisively calls the ‘Green New Scam,’” the lawsuit alleged. It’s not clear how many of the grants that were approved in Biden’s final year are tied to that lawsuit, although the California Energy Commission said its major grants are not.

The suit makes various arguments as to why this money should still be spent. Chief among them is that the money flows out of statutes duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. And in some cases it also says that without these huge infusions of federal funds, some states will not be able to hit ambitious targets they set to combat global warming.

Leftist environmental groups have calculated the difference between the closure of renewable energy projects in the Biden and Trump administrations, according to a New York Times column in May. Their figures show Biden “canceled, closed or downsized” 25 such projects worth $3.5 billion in 2023 and 2024, while last year, Trump’s first back in office, saw 61 such projects crimped or shuttered with a value of $34.76 billion.

But Larry Behrens, spokesman for the conservative Power The Future energy advocacy group, said there is no reason taxpayers should finance coastal states’ efforts to shift their economies from traditional energy sources to renewables.

“Working families in Louisiana, Florida, or Ohio should not be forced to bankroll the out-of-touch climate goals for politicians in New York, California, or Illinois,” he said. “Every one of these grants should be scrutinized for fraud so taxpayers will stop being treated like an unlimited ATM for the green agenda.”