As the Biden Administration rushes to approve clean energy loans before President-elect Trump takes office, the Department of Energy’s inspector general is now calling on the 46th president to pump the brakes on the nearly $400 billion program which she warns poses a “significant risk of fraud.”

The letter, from inspector general Teri Donaldson, claims that the office in charge of the program has failed to ensure a “regulatory and contractually compliant and effective system to manage organizational conflicts of interest.” These shortcomings, which became evident after a months-long audit into the program, open the door to “a significant risk of fraud, waste, and abuse,” Ms. Donaldson warns. 

“In the private sector, each party has a ‘baked in’ economic incentive to watch, track, and account for its own dollars. That economic incentive does not exist in the public sector, where Federal dollars are more likely to be treated as ‘monopoly money,’ Ms. Donaldson writes. 

She is now calling for the office to suspend all loan and loan guarantee packages “until the LPO can ensure that contracting officers and the contracting officers’ representatives are complying with conflicts of interest regulations.”

The inspector general’s letter raises new alarm over a program which has already been criticized for issuing hefty loans to high-risk companies. One such company, Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that received a $535 million loan guarantee in 2009, collapsed in 2011, leaving taxpayers to bear the brunt of the loan. 

Though the loan program was infused with billions of dollars back in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, officials under the current administration have been rapidly issuing lending contracts out of fear that Trump will drop the program once he takes office.