by Thomas Catenacci
The Washington Free Beacon
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin tells the Free Beacon the grant is an example of the ‘lack of accountability’ at Biden’s EPA
The Biden Environmental Protection Agency gave a little-known social justice advocacy group $20 million to restore wetlands and remove lead pipes in hundreds of homes. The group has no experience doing either of those things.
The EPA awarded the grant to Democracy Green in December as part of a $1.6 billion environmental justice initiative—the Climate Justice Community Change Program—championed by former president Joe Biden and former EPA administrator Michael Regan. Democracy Green said at the time that it would be tasked with implementing the grant’s programs while another group, the Working Lands Trust, would be tasked with providing administrative support…
But Democracy Green has never conducted wetlands restoration or lead pipe removals at any scale, a Washington Free Beacon review found. One of its top accomplishments includes providing fewer than 200 families in central North Carolina with home water quality test kits and, in some cases, with water filtration pitchers. Water test kits typically cost less than $10 and water filtration pitchers usually cost about $30, while lead pipe replacement projects are generally completed by licensed plumbing companies and cost $4,700 on average…
“The whole thing has grift written all over it,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told the Free Beacon. “If this was a serious problem, you wouldn’t send $20 million to some nonprofit run by a mother-daughter team with no experience. I mean, was EPA going to follow up with these women? Were they going to report on lead pipes replaced? It just makes no sense.”
