OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
12:30 PM – Thursday, February 20, 2025
Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), discovered $2 billion in government funds allocated to a nonprofit organization connected to failed Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, with help from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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In April 2024, the organization Power Forward Communities received a grant from the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency as part of the agency’s “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” initiative.
Despite being established months earlier in late 2023 and never managing to reach the grant’s monetary amount, its most recent tax filings show that it made only $100 in total income in its first three months of operation. Power Forward Communities was awarded the green energy grant during the Biden administration.
The grant allotted to Power Forward Communities was one of just eight grants totaling $20 billion awarded by the EPA in April 2024 — through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The federal government’s oversight of the program was limited when Trump-appointed EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on February 13th that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials had found that the Biden administration had parked the same $20 billion at an outside financial institution prior to his departure.
There are ethical concerns regarding how the Biden administration chose recipients of such large grants and if they exemplified clear political preference when awarding them, given the disclosure that Power Forward Communities is one of the recipients of the funds that Zeldin’s team located.
Abrams had campaigned for former vice president Kamala Harris during her presidential run, and she was an outspoken supporter of the Biden administration’s green energy policies.
Additionally, it seems to confirm Republican worries that the Biden administration allies would support groups intended to receive federal funding through initiatives like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was established as a “green bank” by Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars, and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin told the press. “When we learned about the Biden Administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.”
“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he continued. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”
In October 2023, a coalition of groups called Power Forward Communities was formed under the direction of Rewiring America, a left-wing organization that promotes electrification policies and a move away from reliance on fossil fuels.
At the time, Abrams, senior attorney for Rewiring America, expressed her excitement about joining the Power Forward Communities collaboration.
“For an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant—it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud,” argued Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future.
On its website, Power Forward Communities mentions a wide range of partners with whom it “collaborates” to carry out its purpose. Its partners include Fair Count and the Southern Economic Advancement Project, two left-leaning NGOs Abrams established following her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor election.
According to Influence Watch, the Tides Center, which is well-known for providing millions of dollars to left-wing environmental and social activist groups, is the fiscal sponsor of the Southern Economic Advancement Project—which claims to increase “racial equity” and “economic power” in the South.
The American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO, two significant labor unions with Democratic affiliations, are also listed as partners of Power Forward Communities.
Both Abrams and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, are also members of the national advisory board for Climate Power, which assisted in launching a $55 million campaign in September to support Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
In January this year, The New Georgia Project, a nonprofit voting advocacy group founded by Abrams, was also hit with the largest fine for campaign finance violations in the state’s history. The New Georgia Project was founded in 2013 by Abrams before being taken over by Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) in 2017, operating as a “charity” accepting tax-deductible donations.
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