Depending where you get the info, this ($400 billion) is as much as 1/4 of the Federal Deficit,, generated by an office nobody has ever heard of (LPO), run by people nobody has ever heard of, for purposes nobody has ever heard of. It should be the OSE, the Office of Self Enrichment.
Over at the Department of Energy, our Alana Goodman reports, green loan czar Jigar Shah finalized a $1.6 billion loan to Plug Power, a company Shah invested in shortly before he joined the administration.
The Department of Energy’s loan to Plug Power, a hydrogen fuel developer, comes months after Republican lawmakers raised concerns about the company’s past business relationship with DOE Loan Programs Office Director Jigar Shah. Shortly before joining the Biden administration, Shah invested $100 million in Plug Power through a green financial firm he founded called Generate Capital, the Washington Free Beacon first reported last year.
The funding announcement comes just weeks after the department’s inspector general called on Shah to immediately halt all loans from the Loan Programs Office, citing a "significant risk of fraud" and conflicts of interest concerns within the lending program. The LPO eschewed the warning and has pumped out billions to companies in the final weeks of the Biden administration.
The Plug Power announcement is likely to fuel Republican criticism of Shah’s tenure at the LPO, which ballooned from a near-dormant program during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term to a $400 billion spending powerhouse under President Joe Biden.