Donald Trump’s freshly appointed Environmental Protection Agency chief is trying to seize $2 billion in federal grant money from a coalition of nonprofits that includes Habitat for Humanity.
The money is set to be used to build thousands of affordable, energy-efficient houses by Power Forward Communities, an umbrella organization for five nonprofits including Habitat for Humanity and United Way.
The money is already in the process of being spent on building houses: it is sitting in a bank account waiting to be accessed by the group. But Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has publicly vowed to try to prevent it from being paid out by Citibank, where the previous administration deposited $20 billion in green grants for disbursement.
The Daily Beast unraveled the attack on Habitat for Humanity after Zeldin—a failed candidate for governor of New York before being given a job by Trump—claimed he was stopping “gold bars” leaving the government’s coffers.
“The Biden EPA put this in writing to make sure not only are they tossing these gold bars off the Titanic, their words not mine, but they’re trying to make it very difficult to recover. We’re not going to rest,” Zeldin said in a Fox News interview this week. The clip was reposted by the Trump administration’s rapid response account on X.
Zeldin’s use of the words “gold bars” is intentional. It’s a reference to a hidden-camera video published by the far-right activist group Project Veritas in December that seems to show a former EPA official admitting that the green grants were deposited at Citi to preempt Trump’s attempts at pulling the funding.
Having a private bank disburse the money leaves it beyond the direct reach of the new administration—as Zeldin noted on Fox News.
In the leaked video, the EPA official put it this way: “It’s like we’re on the Titanic, and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”
However, Zeldin is trying to get Citi to send the money back.
In a press release earlier this month touting his identification of the grants, he deemed the funding “waste and abuse,” without explaining how or why this is true.
“Roughly twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA,” he said. “This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
The award was announced in April and committed in September. There is so far no evidence that any laws were violated in the process. The federal government frequently relies on private banks to handle financial transactions, including paying out government benefits.
Nevertheless, Zeldin told Fox News, “The entire scheme, in my opinion, is criminal.”
Neither the EPA or Habitat for Humanity immediately responded to the Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman with little experience in environmental policy-making, has also tried to raise further ethical concerns about the funding by linking Power Forward Communities to former Georgia Democratic lawmaker and candidate for governor Stacey Abrams.
In an ostensible attempt to suggest that Biden was trying to funnel money to favored Democrats, Zeldin has referred to the nonprofit coalition as “Stacey Abram’s Power Forward Communities.”
In truth, Abrams was a former paid adviser to Rewiring America, one of the coalition’s members. The nonprofit told Politico that Abrams’ contract ended in 2024 and that she will not receive any of the grant money. She has never held a position at Power Forward Communities.
“Power Forward Communities has no relationship with Ms. Abrams, other than the fact that she’s one of the people who have advised one of our coalition members in the past,” the coalition’s CEO, Tim Mayopoulos, told Politico.
Mayopoulos also told the outlet that his organization is planning to begin using its initial disbursement of $539 million in the coming weeks, and it expects Citi will pay out.
“When the EPA made a grant to us and grants to other awardees, there’s an official contract that the government enters into,” he said. “The agreement has not been terminated, and we have an obligation to fulfill it.”
The funds will be used to build or improve 11,000 multi-family and 61,000 single-family homes, create 64,000 jobs, and reduce energy bills by $1.26 billion, Mayopoulos told Politico.
“I’m a little perplexed that this is at all controversial,” Mayopoulos added. “We are in violent agreement with the president that the cost of housing and the cost of energy is too high for many Americans, and we are looking to address that issue.”
The Oversight Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is set to hold a hearing on Wednesday with the title “Examining the Biden Administration’s Energy and Environment Spending Push.”
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which allocated the $20 billion in question, is an item for discussion, according to the agenda. Echoing Zeldin, the meeting’s memorandum cites concerns about “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
