Elon Musk and D.O.G.E. are investigating current expenditures and recovering them wherever possible, but what about past expenditures that don't pass the smell test? Here's one report that should make any taxpayer see red.
If the Biden administration’s green energy agenda were a bus, it would have no wheels, a dead battery, and a $160 million price tag. Enter Lion Electric, a Canadian electric school bus company that was handed nearly $160 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies—only to collapse into bankruptcy, leaving school districts across America high and dry.
Now, watchdogs like EPA administrator Lee Zeldin are demanding answers, exposing yet another mismanaged, wasteful, and completely avoidable green energy failure.
As part of Biden’s $5 billion Clean School Bus program, Lion Electric was awarded $159 million to produce 435 electric buses. The administration touted it as a hallmark of its climate agenda, with Kamala Harris herself front and center, gushing over the initiative.
Fast forward to today:
- Lion Electric has stopped manufacturing.
- It has laid off its workforce.
- It hasn’t delivered $95 million worth of promised buses to 55 school districts.
. . .
Here’s the kicker: Lion Electric was in deep financial trouble long before Biden started funneling money into it.
Since 2020, the company has lost $301.6 million.
Its stock price has collapsed from $33.48 per share to just $0.08—a staggering 99.7% wipeout.
It was hit with a class-action lawsuit after allegedly misleading investors with “grossly unrealistic financial projections”.
And yet, the Biden administration kept the money flowing, rewarding a failing company because it fit the “green energy” narrative.
There's more at the link.
So . . . where's that $159 million? Since no products were delivered in exchange for it, can the money be recovered from either the company, or its (presumably long-departed) executives? Can their property be escheated or seized, and sold to recover some of the money? What about the new factory the company built, which is now deserted and abandoned? Can it be sold?
And what about the bureaucrats who approved that investment despite knowing - as they must surely have known - about the company's existing financial difficulties? Malfeasance, perhaps? That should be investigated with a fine-tooth comb.
As a taxpayer, I'm infuriated. As an American, I'm disgusted that those who were supposed to lead and build up and support the country turn out to have done anything but that.
Peter
13 comments:
So Obama got past the shovel ready jobs bill at roughly 1 trillion, since no budget was passed since then and only continuing resolutions that 1 trillion was funded every year, where did it go?
I'd like to know what school bus is worth $365k...
Anyone conscious knows where the money went. Most of those millions were laundered back into the Biden Family Crime Syndicate with some for associates and friends. There was NEVER any intentions of actually delivering on the "contract".
Money laundering on all sides...sigh
The problem with your thinking here is that you EXPECTED them to turn out a product. There was never going to be
A) A profitable company
B) A actual product, and
C) A return for the sucker investors
that's not extreme, a regular school bus can run up to $200k and a quick search says electric school busses can hit $500k
> can the money be recovered from either the company, or its (presumably long-departed) executives
probably not. One of the purposes of a corporation is to limit the liability to the shareholders/officers.
Usually to 'pierce the corporate veil' you have to show actual fraud. Going broke is not enough to show fraud.
David Lang
"A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon you're talking real money."~~ Ev Dirksen
Solyndra II
And let's not forget ... As stated in the quote, it was a Canadian company. Apart from the fraud, they chose to not support domestic manufacturers, either established companies or providing a shot to a startup.
A full decade ago in 2015, the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General reported that 6.5 million active Social Security numbers were assigned to people aged 112 or older, despite there being only 35 such individuals known to be living worldwide. (Robert Kennedy should be happy to hear about this.) That was alarming enough, but in 2023, an expanded audit looked at SSNs aged 100 and up. This time, 18.9 million active SSNs with birthdates of 1920 or earlier lacked a date of death, meaning they are still active.
So either fraud on a massive scale, incredibly screwed up accounting, or most likely a bit of both.
I sincerely hope that this is just sloppy record keeping and we are not really making SS payments to fictional accounts. But in my 25 years of Federal civil service I participated in a number of source evaluation boards and was regularly assigned to special teams reviewing performance and regulation compliance for major government contracts so having official records this screwed up causes me grief and embarrassment for the agency responsible. In particular that rather than correcting the discrepancies uncovered by that 2015 IG report the issue was allowed to become almost three times worse.
7:10 that the money (some of it, probably about 30% was used to fund "consultations" for people connected to the Biden administration. if not consultations then management positions for which they never showed ..."Ghost Jobs" as it were.
The only way to find them is to follow the money, and for that you need the books and bank accounts.
If they take Whoopi, Cher , Madonna and Michael Moore we'll forget about the money.
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