The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has been digging into the federal loan guarantees given to the solar company Solyndra, which is now bankrupt. It goes beyond incompetence. They have uncovered emails showing the White House pushed the loans, despite evidence that the company had a flawed business model and was doomed to failure.
The Wall Street Journal reported that White House emails were quoted during today’s hearing.
At a hearing on how Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee in 2009, Republicans on the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations quoted emails in which officials from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which does due diligence on loan guarantees, appeared to be under pressure to approve the guarantee. At the time, White House staffers were planning an event at the company’s headquarters attended by Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one OMB staffer wrote to Vice President Joe Biden’s domestic policy adviser on Aug. 31, 2009, according to a partial email released by the subcommittee. “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around.”
The administration has been scrambling to defend the Solyndra loan guarantee this month after the company filed for bankruptcy protection, citing downward pressure on solar panel prices. Federal agents subsequently raided the company’s offices as part of an investigation into whether the company misled the government.
Is it “misleading” when the ones being misled are fully aware of the facts? President Obama was pretty tight with some of Solyndra’s investors, and White House officials were aware of the concerns regarding Solyndra’s finances.
Yesterday the Washington Post reported that the emails were released to them, and they certainly appear to show White House officials were pushing for these loan guarantees.
The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.
Solyndra collapsed two weeks ago, leaving taxpayers liable for the $535 million loan.
One e-mail from an OMB official referred to “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” Another complained, “There isn’t time to negotiate.”
“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”
There’s been some buzz in the past few days that the Bush administration began the loan process, but even if that’s true, they also decided not to guarantee any loans to Solyndra, according to ABC News.
The White House also noted to ABC News that the Bush administration was the first to consider Solyndra’s application and that some executives at the company have a history of donating to Republicans. The results of the Congressional probe shared Tuesday with ABC News show that less than two weeks before President Bush left office, on January 9, 2009, the Energy Department’s credit committee made a unanimous decision not to offer a loan commitment to Solyndra.
Even after Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, analysts in the Energy Department and in the Office of Management and Budget were repeatedly questioning the wisdom of the loan. In one exchange, an Energy official wrote of “a major outstanding issue” — namely, that Solyndra’s numbers showed it would run out of cash in September 2011.
Wow! The bureaucrats were almost spot-on in their assessment, so why did the White House push these loans? And why is Uncle Sam playing venture capitalist, anyway?
Doug Ross has dubbed this scandal “Solargate” and pointed out that despite these revelations, the administration is continuing to push “investment” in solar companies.
Maggie’s Notebook has more on Obama’s half a billion dollar photo op.
Update: Now the Treasury Department is conducting an investigation.
Here are video reports from ABC and NBC. NBC called it Obama’s “green embarrassment,” which has to be the understatement of the year.
Tags: Bush, emails, hearing, obama, oversight, scandal, Solargate, Solyndra
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