On Wednesday, the U.S. Energy Department announced it will begin doling out $4 billion in taxpayer-funded loan aid to renewable energy companies.
“We’re back in business,” Peter Davidson, executive director of the department’s loan programs office, told Reuters. “We really want to go back to … doing very valuable work for our economy going forward.”
Obama’s controversial DOE green energy loan program sparked a firestorm when Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer revealed that 80% of all $20.5 billion in DOE loans were given to Obama’s top campaign donors. In his New York Times bestseller Throw Them All Out, Schweizer called the Obama green energy loan slush fund “the greatest–and most expensive–example of crony capitalism in American history.”
The Obama administration, however, now says that in the wake of the Schweizer revelations and the Solyndra scandal that funneled $535 million in loan guarantees to Obama bundler George Kaiser, the DOE has implemented improved due diligence and loan oversight practices.
Supporters of free market competition ask why the Obama administration is using taxpayer money to invest in favored companies with crony connections at a time when the U.S. national debt is at $17,581,532,044,819.00 and climbing.