President Joe Biden’s agencies allowed bureaucracy, indecision and fear of repeating past mistakes to undermine their efforts to bankroll a historic green energy revolution, former administration officials wrote in a newly prepared autopsy of the ex-president’s energy agenda.
Memories of Solyndra, a solar manufacturer whose 2011 collapse stirred political headaches for the Obama administration, also fed the Biden officials’ risk-aversion, the report concluded.
The document, shared first with POLITICO, said that even as administration officials worked to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to build battery plants, solar farms, electric vehicle factories and other clean energy projects, they underestimated how aggressively the incoming Trump team would seek to undo their programs. The slow rollout also made it harder for Biden’s programs to withstand those attacks, they signaled.
“Three years after the first of [Biden-era] laws passed, only a handful of federally funded projects had broken ground,” the report said. “This meant the political theory animating the administration’s approach — that the economic development generated by clean energy projects and industries would create a durable bipartisan coalition — was never truly tested.”
