President Joe Biden’s Energy Department announced on Monday that it plans to lend $6 billion to Rivian—a company that only makes electric vehicles—to build an electric car factory in Georgia just before Biden leaves office.
Department of Energy and Rivian are expected to sign the agreement, making the loan binding, before Trump takes office in January, the New York Times reported.
The Rivian loan is one of more than a dozen green energy loans, worth more than $25 billion, that the Biden administration is rushing to finalize before the octogenarian president leaves office, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found this month. Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail to “terminate” green energy spending.
This rushed effort has lawmakers and industry officials warning could lead to fraud and abuse of taxpayer money.
“President Biden’s Department of Energy is rushing billions of dollars out the door as a last-ditch effort to advance its failing rush-to-green agenda,” House Energy and Commerce Committee chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.) told the Free Beacon earlier this month. “This effort only increases the risk for Solyndra-style waste and abuse—which is why the administration should immediately end its reckless spending spree,” Rodgers added, referring to a solar panel company that filed for bankruptcy just two years after the Obama administration gave it $535 million.
The president-elect and Republicans in Congress have promised to eliminate environmental policies that they say force auto companies to sell electric vehicles that consumers do not buy.
“The American people spoke very clearly this month,” the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers said in a statement shared with the Free Beacon. “They do not support EV mandates, and they want the Trump-Vance administration to follow through with their day 1 promise to rescind EPA’s tailpipe standards and deny California’s request to fully ban gas cars.”
The loan will provide a needed boost for Rivian, which is struggling to make profits selling its electric vehicles. Construction of Rivian’s Georgia factory had been on hold since March because of Rivian’s poor financial state.
Less than 10 percent of all car sales in the United States are electric, according to data released in October by the Alliance For Automotive Innovation.
“On day one, I hope the Trump administration will halt all loans that are not closed and audit all of the projects that have been approved, but especially the ones they are attempting to rush out the door since the election,” said Tom Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research and a member of the 2016 Trump transition team.
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