The DOGEing of the Environmental NGOs Can’t Come Soon Enough

President Biden described the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law in 2022, as “the most aggressive action ever, ever, ever to confront the climate crisis.” The Nature Conservancy described the act as “the most ambitious funding ever for tackling climate change.” The US Green Building Council called it “the largest climate legislation in U.S. history.”

The reliably hyperbolic Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed about the IRA for the New York Times entitled “Did the Democrats Just Save Civilization?” He called the IRA bill “a very big deal. The act isn’t, by itself, enough to avert climate disaster. But it’s a huge step in the right direction and sets the stage for more action in the years ahead”.

Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men can still go wrong: Donald J. Trump won the elections. In a whirlwind of executive orders, President Trump took a sledgehammer to the climate change agenda (here, here and here) that played such a central role in the Biden administration.

Soon after winning the elections, President-elect Donald Trump named Elon Musk to a role aimed at creating a more efficient government as lead of a newly created Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said that DOGE "will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies."

The receipts are beginning to come in, courtesy DOGE. From the evidence flooding in, environmental NGOs constitute a key plank of the bloated administrative state. The environmentalist cause animating the climate industrial complex seemed to be in a feeding frenzy off the largesse provided by President Biden’s duplicitously named IRA.

Tossing Gold Bars Off the Titanic

Brent Efron, a special advisor at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the Biden administration, was recorded in an undercover Project Veritas investigation in December 2024 admitting to a mad dash to distribute billions in grants, aiming to lock in Biden's climate agenda before Trump’s return to office. In the video, Efron described the EPA’s efforts to rapidly distribute billions of dollars before the incoming Trump administration could take office on January 20^th, 2025. He used the phrase “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” to illustrate the frantic pace at which the agency was pushing out funds.

Efron’s comments were tied to the EPA’s handling of IRA funds that allocated significant resources—over $50 billion by his estimate—for climate initiatives including the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). He suggested that the EPA was funnelling money to nonprofits as an “insurance policy” against potential rollbacks by the Trump administration which had campaigned on dismantling Biden-era climate policies.

Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced on February 13^th that his team had located $20 billion of these funds “parked” at Citibank under a scheme to rush money out with reduced oversight. In a letter to the EPA Acting Inspector General (IG), Administrator Zeldin formally referred the DOGE-documented financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures with the GGRF for further investigation.

In one cited example, a Stacey Abrams-linked environmental organization called Power Forward Communities which had reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion, 20 million times the organization’s last reported revenue. In an MSNBC interview, Ms Abrams, a twice-failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate, explained that the money was to have been spent purchasing energy-efficient home appliances so as to save households money. In her words, this was a means to “invest the money of America to lower the cost of Americans.” Steve Milloy, who served on President Donald Trump’s first-term EPA transition team, described the Abrams-linked “grift” as a “vote buying” ploy akin to the Obama-era “Obama phones.”

Environmental NGO Cronyism in the US

To President Biden’s critics, the “climate crisis” is code for government-manufactured hysteria over a non-existent hobgoblin and the IRA legislation was nothing more than the usual green cronyism to reward political lobbies which finance election campaigns. The US Department of Energy’s $535 million failed loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra during President Obama’s administration is just one instance of the more scandalous examples of renewable energy subsidies that lost tax-payers’ money. Last month, news emerged that the Ivanpah solar power project, one of the most expensive green energy projects ever undertaken in American history, costing $2.2 billion to build, will likely declare bankruptcy “after eating up massive amounts of taxpayer dollars and killing thousands of birds”.

President Biden’s IRA which would have unleashed an estimated $1 trillion deluge of subsidies on favoured “green” industries was new in the sheer scale of green boondoggles contemplated. As Stalin might have said, the quantity brings a quality of its own. It brought government funding of environmental NGOs into the centre of the hyped-up global “fight against climate change”.

In the popular imagination, NGOs are grassroots movements -- expressions of “civil society” -- that represent the interests of various causes from the “bottom up”. Leading environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are often described as “non-profits” that depend on small donations by ordinary people who support nature conservation and other such widely shared public objectives.

But it has also been apparent for years that big foundations funded by billionaire families like the Gates, Getty, and Rockefeller foundations have played a dominating role in funding the various alarmist “fight climate change” campaigns. But until Elon Musk’s DOGE revelations recently, the role these billionaire foundations play in influencing various government entities to fund their favourite causes has been less well known.

In an interview with Joe Rogan, Musk explained how government-funded NGOs can pursue activities which would be illegal if done directly by governments. In what he describes as “a gigantic scam”, he identifies the arbitraging genius of billionaires such as George Soros who set up NGOs with a small amount of funds, then lobby governments to “leverage up” NGOs with much larger financial resources to pursue their agendas.

A data scientist was recently interviewed about a searchable database at DataRepublican.com which reveals the opaque connections between government grants and NGOs, exposing billions in wasteful spending: “Just 7,000 politically connected NGOs are hoarding 90% of all taxpayer money meant for nonprofits. Roughly $300 billion in government money flows to nonprofits every year—with zero transparency on where that money actually goes.”

Environmental NGOs in the Global South

In 2023, Greenpeace Russia was labelled “undesirable” by the Prosecutor-General's Office and all its activities in the country were rendered illegal. In 2015, Greenpeace India was similarly banned, after the country’s Intelligence Bureau charged that the group was a threat to the country’s national security. The ban on Greenpeace India provoked much furore in the Western press, most notably from the standard schoolmarms of the old colonial metropole, the BBC and the Guardian (here and here).

It is no surprise that the green chattering classes of the West will cast government constraints over foreign financed, mainly Western NGOs operating in the Global South as another example of autocratic government riding roughshod over noble organizations that speak on behalf of ordinary people in these countries. Alas were it that simple or true.

Western environmental NGOs became a fixture in UN’s many specialized agencies, and since the 1990s, many were formally recognized as “partner agencies” in setting programmes and policies concerning developing countries. In a subversion of constitutional democracy, they directly participated in setting UN climate agendas. They also played an influencing role in World Bank activities. The environmental NGOs oppose the use of fossil fuels in developing countries in the name of “sustainable development” and other such nebulous concepts dreamed up by the luxury beliefs of privileged intellectuals of the developed West.

The revelations arising from Elon Musk’s DOGE and its forensic sleuthing of financial flows between US government agencies and the environmental NGOs could not have come sooner for the American taxpayer and the citizens of the poorer developing countries. Both groups benefit by better financial oversight of the world’s environmental NGOs.