On President Joe Biden’s way out the door, officials in his administration were busy—not just packing up their offices, but shoveling as much money as possible before incoming President Donald Trump could get his hands on it.
Per the U.S. Department of Energy’s website, its Loan Programs Office (LPO) provides “clean energy and advanced transportation technologies….with access to needed loans and loan guarantees when private lenders cannot or will not.” As of August 2022, the LPO had loaned out only $32.7 billion, but Biden-era spending bills supercharged the office, increasing its loan authority for infrastructure projects to $400 billion. Of that total, though, $290 billion would expire in September 2026, with another $50 billion expiring in 2028.
Besides, Trump is famously skeptical of green energy projects and would be unlikely to use the cash on projects favored by progressives. So in the roughly two months between Trump’s election and inauguration, Biden administration officials worked diligently to approve as many projects—and spend as much taxpayer money—as possible.
In November 2024, just weeks after the election, the LPO announced “a direct loan of up to $6.57 billion” that would allow Rivian, a luxury electric vehicle (E.V.) manufacturer, to finish construction on its new factory in Georgia—even though that state’s government previously awarded the company tax credits and incentives worth as much as $1.5 billion. Also in November, the LPO announced a loan guarantee of up to $4.9 billion for the Grain Belt Express Phase 1, a high-capacity network of power lines running from Kansas to Missouri.
In a single week in December, the LPO announced a $9.63 billion loan for BlueOval SK to build three Ford Motor Co. E.V. and E.V. battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky; a $1.25 billion loan for EVgo to expand its network of public E.V. chargers; a $1.45 billion loan to Qcells, a South Korean manufacturer building a solar panel factory in Georgia; a $7.54 billion loan to a subsidiary of Stellantis (formerly Fiat Chrysler) building an E.V. battery factory in Indiana; a $2.5 billion loan guarantee to We Energies in Wisconsin for “a portfolio of individual projects”; and a loan guarantee of up to $15 billion to Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), the utility that provides gas and electricity to much of California, to modernize the state’s power grid.
The LPO originally planned on $30 billion for PG&E, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, but “the amount was cut in half, in part because of PG&E concerns about the hefty upfront payments such a large loan would have required.” The Journal also noted that the LPO was racing to close the loan before Trump’s inauguration over “fear [that] Trump officials could curtail loans from the office.”
“Under President Biden, the office has announced roughly $54 billion in loans or loan guarantees,” The New York Times wrote on December 6, 2024. “Of that, $19 billion was announced in the weeks after the election”—and several of the loans listed above were announced after the Times‘ article went to press.
Spending taxpayer money to boost, prop up, or bail out private businesses is bad enough. But the accelerated timeline also increases the likelihood that some of these deals, perhaps undertaken in haste, will prove poor investments.
This was already a concern before the election, with the fund’s looming expiration in 2026 and beyond. “The pressure to beat these deadlines introduces the risk that the LPO will enter into loans it otherwise would not….because of insufficient time to conduct rigorous due diligence, to negotiate terms that could effectively mitigate the risks identified during the due diligence, and to consider alternative projects that might offer a more favorable risk profile,” according to a November 2024 report from the Department of Energy Office of the Inspector General.
Regardless of the efficacy of using public money to issue or guarantee loans to private companies, it’s alarming for a presidential administration to spend its final days rushing to approve new spending just so the incoming president can’t. It signals an all-too-common attitude in government that taxed money is better spent than returned to the taxpayers who provided it.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Biden Rushed Billions Out Before Trump Took Office.”
