Talk about bad timing:
The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.
The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget.
The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators. […]
In one e-mail, an assistant to Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, wrote on Aug. 31, 2009, to OMB about the upcoming Biden announcement on Solyndra and asked whether “there is anything we can help speed along on OMB side.”
An OMB staff member responded: “I would prefer that this announcement be postponed. . . . This is the first loan guarantee and we should have full review with all hands on deck to make sure we get it right.”
In another message, a White House staff member wrote that officials were “walking a fine line with Solyndra needing to begin notifying investors to fly in” for the groundbreaking. It stressed that “this OMB piece” of the review was not final and pointed out that if word of the groundbreaking leaked to the public prematurely, that would “leave us in an awkward place.”The e-mails also raise questions about whether the administration should have foreseen financial trouble. In August 2009, e-mail exchanges between Energy Department staff members pointed out that a credit-rating agency predicted that the project would run out of cash in September 2011. Solyndra shut its doors on the final day of August.
My sense is that this is the kind of soft corruption that basically defines the Washington system as it exists today; but it usually isn’t quite so obvious as it is in this case when hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted due to a problematic conflation of ideological and political incentives.
It’s a major part of the current Democratic dogma (outside of West Virginia, at least) that solar energy and “green” energy in general is the obvious solution to our fossil fuel problem. It’s how we best unleash the dynamo of American ingenuity and investment in order to solve all of our problems and make a bunch of money and get everyone jobs and more than a few ponies, too! And if it just so happens that major funders of the Democratic party also have deep financial ties to this burgeoning new field, well, that’s what we just call a happy coincidence, right? Or, rather, it could be seen as merely a sign of how intelligent and farsighted these funders happen to be!
But when you’ve got a guy like Rahm “points on the board” Emanuel running the shop, the consequences can often be pretty messy and dare I say a shade less than entirely ethical. Further, when you think you support government action in specific circumstances to further the greater good but you see the manifestation of that action to be solely acceptable in the form of throwing piles of money at for-profit institutions, well, believe it or not, but things can sometimes become unmoored with the ends not only justifying the means, but the means overtaking the ends altogether.
The White House is just lucky that Rahm’s been gone now for a while—but I still doubt this will be going away anytime soon. That said, I also doubt that it will have a major negative impact on Obama’s reelection besides (and this shouldn’t be underestimated) it taking up air-time and forcing the President to answer questions that have nothing to do with his jobs plan, and which, in fact, offer ammo to those who’d argue that said jobs plan is just another example of corrupt government hand-outs. The money for Solyndra came from the Stimulus bill, mind.
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