The Biden-Harris administration's $3.5 billion initiative to "weatherize" low-income homes through climate-friendly and energy-efficient upgrades is being mismanaged and is vulnerable to "fraud, waste, and abuse," according to a top government watchdog.
In a report published late Tuesday, the Department of Energy's inspector general found that 11 states receiving funds under the agency's Weatherization Assistance Program blew past the legal limit of per unit cost while 21 states and territories did not submit legally required quarterly reports detailing progress on time. Another 16 states and territories have received federal funding to weatherize more than 52,000 units but have yet to complete a single project with that funding.
"This lack of performance is a red flag that warrants immediate department attention," the inspector general wrote in the report sent to Department of Energy leadership last week.
The apparent mismanagement of the program is the latest black eye for the Biden-Harris administration's efforts to fund a wide range of green energy programs as part of its aggressive climate agenda. Weatherization has been singled out by the administration as a "critical" tool for combating global warming, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently stating the program would ensure all Americans have access to "clean energy tools."
The report also comes after the EPA's inspector general conducted multiple investigations into the Clean School Bus Program, finding that that program is similarly falling short of oversight requirements.
Funding for both the Weatherization Assistance Program and Clean School Bus Program was earmarked under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in November 2021. That law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act earmarked hundreds of billions of dollars for climate programs, which the administration has raced to get out the door in recent months, ahead of the upcoming election, the Associated Press reported.
According to the inspector general report published Tuesday, federal statute sets a limit of $8,497 per unit that state and local governments are allowed to spend weatherizing homes. The 11 states that exceeded that limit exceeded it by at least 50 percent, with New York spending $32,551 per unit and Alaska spending a staggering $93,588 per unit.
"The fact that the metrics are so far above the threshold warrants additional scrutiny by federal project managers, which is difficult to do if required reports are not submitted in a timely manner," the report stated, noting the 21 states and territories that failed to submit quarterly performance reports on time.
Among the 16 states and territories that haven't completed a single weatherization project under the program are Ohio, which was awarded funding for 12,510 projects, and California, which was awarded funding for 8,519 projects. Those plans were approved by the Department of Energy in mid-2023.
"We have known that all the green spending that passed through Congress was nothing but an enormous slush fund," said Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future. "There's no accountability into any of this green slush fund or how it is spent. It's allocated based upon political agenda."
"Whether it's environmental justice, whether it's weatherization of low-income housing, the metric of success is spending money—not the effectiveness of these programs," Turner continued.
The Weatherization Assistance Program, which was first created in the 1970s, has historically been a much smaller-scale program—its fiscal year 2022 budget was $313 million. In other words, the infrastructure bill increased the size of the program by more than 1,000 percent by adding $3.5 billion to its budget.
The Department of Energy's watchdog said that, prior to the massive infusion of new funding, the program already had "a history of both fraud and internal control problems."
Further, the inspector general made a series of recommendations for the agency to tighten up its oversight of the program in the report. The watchdog also took the uncommon step of announcing a new "oversight campaign" to more thoroughly investigate the program at the grantee and subgrantee level, focusing on "eligibility, activities allowed and not allowed, compliance with cost principles, reporting, subrecipient monitoring, and other risk areas."
Department of Energy principal deputy director Keishaa Austin said the agency concurred with the inspector general's findings and that it would pursue the recommendations outlined in the report. The department declined to comment further.