Clean-Energy Scandal: GOP Disaster Relief Plan Destroys $500 Million Of Taxpayer Money

While Republicans are keeping media attention on a $528 million federal loan to the bankrupt company Solyndra, they are working to make another $500 million in taxpayer money disappear without a trace. House Republicans have passed legislation to add $1 billion in funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief fund, offset by cutting $1.5 billion from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program at the Department of Energy.

A full half a billion dollars is lost in the transfer from the long-term loan program to the emergency relief fund.

Crippling the clean-car fund to pay for this year’s climate disasters compounds the stupidity of deliberately destroying $500 million of taxpayer funds.

“It is staggeringly shortsighted to pay for the economic losses of climate disasters by choking off funding for policies that reduce the threat of future climate disasters,” Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, told ThinkProgress Green when this bill was passed out of committee in May. “The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program is helping US companies right now, to remain competitive and protect good manufacturing jobs, by producing highly efficient vehicles that cut dependence on foreign oil.”

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) first proposed the plan.