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🌊 The Truth About the $20B “Slush Fund”

Did the EPA create a corrupt $20B slush fund?

March 29, 2025

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By Max Frost

Early this February, several environmental campaigners signed onto their organizations’ accounts at CitiBank, expecting to find millions or billions of dollars available. Instead, they found themselves locked out, unable to access the money that had been granted to them. 

Soon after, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lee Zeldin issued a warning: “The bank must immediately return all of the gold bars that the Biden Administration tossed off the Titanic.”

“Waste, fraud, and abuse” has become a mantra for Republicans since the start of Trump’s second term. Democrats, meanwhile, say it’s a bogus slogan that’s being used to circumvent Congress and gut any type of funding that Trump doesn’t like. 

Perhaps no situation has encapsulated this split more than that surrounding an alleged $20B “slush fund” at the EPA. 

There has been a vast amount of noise circulating about this story: According to Republicans, the Biden Administration unloaded this money into bank accounts just before Trump took office so progressives could then pay it out to their friends. According to Democrats, Trump’s efforts to reclaim the money are an illegal effort to overrule the legislative branch. 

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said, “Your announcement is the latest example of the Trump Administration and its government efficiency ‘experts’ using unfounded claims of waste, fraud, and abuse as a smokescreen to ignore congressional spending authority and ignore court orders in order to freeze or terminate programs designed to reduce carbon pollution.”

In today’s deep-dive, we cut through the noise and answer the question: Is there really a $20B environmental slush fund sitting in a progressive bank account?

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Editor’s Note

Curious to hear your thoughts: Is this a “slush fund,” or is it something else? Should Trump freeze the funds, or should it be spent as Congress ordered? Let us know by replying to this email.

We’ll be back tomorrow with our final Sierra Leone dispatch. And in case you missed any of our latest stories, here they are:

That’s all. Enjoy your weekends!

-Max and Max