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FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

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Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#71

Post by kristjansson »

alwa wrote: post #62
narutosasuke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power Forward Communities: A coalition of five nonprofit organizations — Enterprise Community Partners, Habitat for Humanity International, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), Rewiring America and United Way Worldwide. Abrams' connection to Power Forward Communities, is through Rewiring America, one of the five organizations that leads the program. That seems pretty weak. No idea what the other group is but…

And it takes some kind of chutzpah to claim that Habitat for Humanity has no track record or competency building affordable housing, just because this collaboration is new…

LISC and ECP too. Like 1.5m affordable units developed between them

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#72

Post by counters »

lazyeye wrote: post #60

Non-profits and ngos have such enormous potential for fraud and abuse. You get your political friends to setup an ngo, give it a nice name like "Climate Progress Coalition" or "Equity Action Network" etc. Hand it a billion dollars of hard-earned taxpayer money and it can then do (without oversight) what would be illegal for the govt to do with oversight. The potential for abuse is limitless...million-dollar salaries,…

Then it should be pretty easy to demonstrate fraud and abuse, hmmm?

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#73

Post by chatmasta »

sofixa wrote: post #66
chatmasta wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had the authority to restructure the administrative state, I’d make a rule that every agency needs an anti-agency to hold it accountable. Let them swap roles every 7 years, with a consistently adversarial relationship to hold each other accountable. Basically a blue team vs. red team setup, or a blue/green deployment. Checks and balances actually work pretty well, but we only use them at the topmost level betwee…

That probably won't work. Blue would have an incentive to prove red failed, so if red initiated a big long term project (say, building a new high speed rail network, or a new dam, or incentives to build auto factories or whatever that cannot be done in the every X years switches happen), blue will do their best to sabotage it. This happens in politics already (e.g. public transit projects started by previous governme…

Hmm. I guess the “public transit projects of previous governments being sabotaged” is by design. Regardless of two-party politics, if the people vote into power a new representative who disagrees with the previous one, then they’ll kill those projects. And they’ll spend their time campaigning on the basis of that. This results in “slow government” which – at least IMO – is a Very Good Thing.

But for agencies, you want the opposite – you want fast reaction to changing environment. So in that sense, career bureaucrats are an advantage as long as they remain relatively politically independent and prioritize based on requirements more than perception. The problems arise when they become affixed to one of the parties, but without the checks and balances.

I think this is maybe okay as long as the “fast reaction” has a “fast undo.” Otherwise a new executive (and their predecessor) actually has less power than the agencies within the executive branch.

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#74

Post by renewiltord »

chatmasta wrote: post #63
npvrite wrote: post #55

[flagged]

If I had the authority to restructure the administrative state, I’d make a rule that every agency needs an anti-agency to hold it accountable. Let them swap roles every 7 years, with a consistently adversarial relationship to hold each other accountable. Basically a blue team vs. red team setup, or a blue/green deployment. Checks and balances actually work pretty well, but we only use them at the topmost level betwee…

The problem with America is that it’s too good at big projects and getting them done quickly. We can improve this by adding a bureaucracy that is incentivized to stall everything. I see. Wise.

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#75

Post by tdeck »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #70
npvrite wrote: post #55

[flagged]

[flagged]

Of course as is typical this comment comes with no evidence.

Meanwhile we're supposed to believe that Trump supporters care about corruption when he did this?

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/10/g-s1-47817/trump-pardon-rod-b...

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#77

Post by rufus_foreman »

actionfromafar wrote: post #67
rufus_foreman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the president is threatening to remove any Republican member of congress who crosses him by supporting a primary challenger Democracy is scary stuff to some people.

Money is people too, or something?

Choosing which political candidates one supports is democracy.

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#78

Post by salynchnew »

Huntsecker wrote: post #7

daily stories coming from the US are pretty crazy, FBI being used as a tool to try and revert something from under the previous administration. Feels like whatever balances and checks that should be in place to stop an autocracy are missing

Yeah, I thought it'd be a cold day in hell before I saw the FBI going after Habitat for Humanity and the United Way.

Re: FBI, EPA, and Treasury told Citibank to freeze funds to claw back climate money

#79

Post by dang »

npvrite wrote: post #55

[flagged]

Can you please make your substantive points without fulminating? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

(This is not a comment on your substantive views, just a request to express them more thoughtfully, in the intended spirit of this site.)

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