In his final hour before the incoming Trump Administration takes over and reverses the current administration's woke policies, outgoing President Joe Biden signed off on a multi-billion-dollar loan to help fuel the left’s push to force every American to buy an electric vehicle.
The lame-duck Biden Administration announced this week that the U.S. Department of Energy would loan $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian Automotive to build Project Horizon, a factory in Georgia. The project has been paused because the startup struggles to get its feet on the ground.
As of September, the EV company’s debt had reached $5.46 billion, a 100 percent increase from the previous year. The company initially halted factory construction to cut costs and speed up production.
However, whether the loan will be completed before President-elect Donald Trump takes office is still unclear. The incoming administration is expected to reduce environmental regulations and rescind Biden’s $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit and $4,000 for used EVs. Had failed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris won the election, she likely would have pushed Biden’s use of $7.5 billion in federal grants to build hundreds of thousands of EV chargers by 2030. However, Trump has already expressed his plans to roll back much of that spending.
Ohio businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (R-OH), who will lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Elon Musk, called the Biden Administration’s move a cheap “political shot.”
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“One 'justification' is the 7,500 jobs it creates, but that implies a cost of $880k/job, which is insane," Ramaswamy said. "This smells more like a political shot across the bow at Elon Musk and Tesla.”
DOGE have said they plan to have said they aim to cut federal spending by about $2 trillion and “slash excess regulations.”
The Biden Administration is also expected to rush the finalization of funding for infrastructure and the U.S. microchip industry before Trump takes office, announcing that Intel has received nearly $8 billion in federal grants under the IRA and CHIPS Act.
However, Ramaswamy warned that DOGE would review “every one of these 11th-hour gambits & recommend that Inspectors General scrutinize these last-minute contracts.”
“Political appointees who go on to work for beneficiaries of this midnight spending spree should be exposed unsparingly,” he wrote in an X post.
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