Trump budget cuts Big Green energy boondoggles

Daily Caller:
President Donald Trump’s budget eliminates a pair of Department of Energy (DOE) green energy loan programs on track to lose taxpayers billions of dollars.

The budget entirely eliminates the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and the Title 17 Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program. The DOE used these programs to issue roughly $16 billion in loan guarantees to 26 different projects over the years. Several of the companies that got taxpayer-backed loans went bankrupt.

These green loan programs lost $2.2 billion dollars between 2008 and 2015, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. As of 2015, the GAO concluded that taxpayers were securing $28 billion in loans for 30 different green energy projects.

These loan guarantees allowed borrowers to receive a privately financed loan with the federal government assuming the risk. If the recipient of the loan defaults, they have the U.S. Treasury as an effective co-signer which often takes on up to 80 percent of the loan’s costs.
...
There is more.

These projects were mostly so marginal they could not get traditional financing because of the likelihood of default and Obama shifted that burden on to taxpayers.   Solyndra comes to mind as a failed DOE financed project associated with the so-called stimulus.

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