Veteran government lawyer Jim Drummond says he “failed retirement several times,” most recently returning to EPA in 2022 to use his experience to help disburse the $100 billion invested through EPA by the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Democrats’ climate law.
Congress had given the agency unprecedented sums to invest and tight timelines to disburse most of it in the form of grants. EPA staff worked hard to do so, especially on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, an Inflation Reduction Act program funding clean energy and other climate projects, Drummond said.
Drummond left the agency in March as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin had started beating the drums over that particular program, which gives $20 billion to nonprofit groups for climate work. Drummond said he took a financial hit by leaving slightly earlier than planned, but he “got very upset about the false statements coming out about the GGRF.”
Zeldin, who terminated the grants in March and has been fighting in court since then to recoup that money, has bashed the entire GGRF program, arguing that EPA gave huge sums to groups with conflicts of interest or that weren’t ready to handle such large grants. But a federal judge said EPA has shown no evidence of wrongdoing that would justify a wholesale scrapping of the program, or even of a single grant, and an FBI investigation has not led to any charges and has reportedly found no criminality.
