By streiff. Media: Redstate
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has shut down another of Joe Biden’s government-funded slush funds. This one would’ve siphoned off as much as $7.4 billion in taxpayer money to fund the lifestyle of members of Biden’s inner circle.
Just four days before Joe Biden stumbled out of the White House for the last time, his administration finalized an agreement with a non-profit called “Natcast” to manage the National Semiconductor Technology Center under the direction of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This award was supposed to be to implement research funding appropriated under the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 U.S. law that provides over $280 billion for research and manufacturing.
The problem is that Natcast was purpose-built to manage the NSTC and was awarded the job without anything resembling fair and open competition. Natcast was so excited about its role that it announced grant awardees three months before it got the job of managing NSTC (see Natcast Announces Anticipated Awardees, Approximately $30 Million Investment through First NSTC R&D Jump Start Project). It was awarded the grant in an illegal manner and was stacked with Biden’s drones.
Rather than establishing the NSTC at the Department, however, Biden Administration officials stood up an entirely new, unaccountable entity—Natcast—to operate the NSTC’s public private-sector consortium on the Commerce Department’s behalf using taxpayer funds. In an effort to skirt clear legal restrictions prohibiting government agencies from establishing corporations, the Biden-era Commerce Department officials handpicked individuals friendly to the Biden Administration to serve on a “Selection Committee” that, in turn, chose who would form the entity that the Department anticipated would serve as the operator of the NSTC.
The Selection Committee included Jason Matheny (who held several roles in the Biden White House), Don Rosenberg (a partner at a venture capital firm whose portfolio companies received at least $117 million in federal grants), and Brenda Wilkerson (a self-described advocate for “social justice for underrepresented communities in technology”).
The Biden Administration then stacked Natcast with former Biden officials. The majority of Natcast’s executives, and a few of its trustees, previously held formal positions either within the Commerce Department itself or as members of the Industrial Advisory Committee, which advised the Commerce Department on CHIPS Act implementation. Documents show the Biden Administration even went so far as to provide Natcast’s trustees with detailed legal and corporate guidance that included recommended bylaws and the state of incorporation—which were readily adopted and implemented. In taking these actions to establish Natcast, the Biden Administration officials violated the Government Corporation Control Act—which forbids the government from establishing an entity to act on behalf of an agency, unless a specific provision of law permits it to do so.
The full letter can be viewed here.
This is exactly the type of lawless behavior we’ve seen with grants awarded under the “green energy” scam and epitomizes just about everything done at USAID.
Lutnick is pulling the management of the NSTC back inside the government, where all of these projects belong.
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