Transparency at the Department of Energy?

HOUSTON - Jan. 5, 2015 - PRLog -- To The National Algae Association: The Obama Administration sought to provide, among other things, transparency and accountability in government. “Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.”

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), commonly referred to as the Stimulus or The Recovery Act, was an economic stimulus package enacted by the 111th United States Congress in February 2009 and signed into law on February 17, 2009, by President (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_United_States) Barack Obama.

This led to the creation of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (the “Board”) and of www.recovery.gov, where one could see who was awarded grants, along with some of the grant particulars. Having only looked at those grants affecting algae projects, I can only speak to the information that we were able to obtain from the website relating to algae projects – how much had been awarded, how much had been funded, how far along the project was and how many people had been employed – all requirements of the grants we investigated.

Several of the projects funded with taxpayer money did not achieve their milestones. NAABB’s $45 million project ended 4 years later with basically the same open issues as it started with. Sapphire Energy, as we all know, recently partnered with China after a few years of rumors about what it was really doing on the private property on which its project, which was funded in substantial part by taxpayer money, was located.

Notwithstanding the requirement in The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, that “each agency that made recovery funds available to any recipient to make available to the public, beginning February 1, 2014, detailed spending data as prescribed by OMB and pursuant to the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006,” the Board, which will sunset on September 30, 2015, ended the specialized reporting associated with the Recovery Act as of February 1, 2014. The Board decided not to renew the licensing agreement that allowed the display of most of the recipient-related data for its last year, and has removed the data that was previously reported. The result is that the data is no longer available, rather than continue to make it publicly available.

The most current information on the website is a chart showing Non-Compliant Recovery Award Recipients – Q4 2013. It was last updated on 2/12/2014. A careful review of the chart shows that the top 5 Award Recipients by dollar volume that were non-compliant were recipients of DOE grants: Solyndra tops the chart at $535,000,000 and is listed as “Not Reported in Three or More Reporting Cycles”, followed by State of New York - $395,996,904 and listed as “Not Reported in Two Reporting Cycles”, Abengoa Bioenergy Biomass of Kansas - $127,375,287 and apparently did not report in January, 2014, Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation at just over $100,000,000 apparently did not report in January 2014, and Saft America, $95,500,000 did not report in January, 2014. As of this writing, the last posting of Recovery Act spending, which was due in May, 2014, was not publicly available.

This means that, in 5 grants alone, the Department of Energy was responsible for funds totaling over $1.2 billion for which there is no final accountability. And without accountability we have paid a lot of money for nothing. This follows on the heels of the 2011 Peer Review which revealed that significant portion of the projects had received 100% of the funds awarded by the DoE but which were less than 50% completed. I have not been able to obtain information to determine if the recipients completed their projects but can assure all of us that they did not return the money.

The most troubling part of this is that, for the most part, the same people who mismanaged the Algae Biomass Program and projects in 2010 and in years prior were never held accountable for their failures and have faced no consequences – most are still in their positions at the DoE and have continued to fail to bring these projects to successful completion. It's now up to private industry to turn this highly unorganized government program into an emerging industry. Funny how in tough economic times one would believe with decades of research some of these algae research government funded technologies would payoff for the taxpayer. It's also interesting in tough economic times these same people are still employed.