Solyndra who? Biden focuses on stimulus loan cronyism with Obama-era criticism forgotten

Biden was referencing Paycheck Protection Program loans intended for small businesses, a program created in emergency legislation to address economic turmoil due to the coronavirus pandemic. The program has come under fire as reports emerged that despite the loans being guaranteed as forgiven by the government, if the businesses meet certain standards, banks administering the loans favored large clients.

The video announcement prompted dozens of responses from social media users suggesting hypocrisy by mentioning Solyndra, the failed solar company.

Solyndra was approved for a $535 million loan from the Department of Energy as part of the 2009 Recovery Act during the Great Recession. ABC reported in 2011 that the Obama administration “bypassed procedural steps meant to protect taxpayers as it hurried to approve an energy loan guarantee to a politically-connected California solar power startup.” One of the company’s major financial backers raised at least $50,000 for Barack Obama in 2008. The solar panel company went bankrupt four years later.

The Solyndra debacle heightened a public mood that the stimulus money meant to help people during the recession was being abused.

Biden as vice president took a leading role in overseeing the distribution of stimulus money. He now points to that responsibility as a major point in his resume as he campaigns against President Trump amid the coronavirus pandemic and another economic crisis.

While the overall effect of the program is still debated, Biden adamantly asserts on the campaign trail that the entire Obama administration, including the stimulus money, was free of scandal or cronyism.

“Know what I was most proud of? For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie,” Biden said at a campaign stop in June, and which he has reiterated many times.

Scrutiny of the 2009 stimulus program, however, prompted many stories of waste and cronyism like Biden is suggesting might be present in the coronavirus small-business loans.

“Overall, the stimulus was notorious for waste and mismanagement. For two years, following the stimulus bill, newspapers were filled with [stories of] fraud. Payments to dead people, money for a turtle bridge, I remember, was one of the examples,” Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, a free market think tank, recently told the Washington Examiner. “The idea that there was no waste is comical.”

A 2010 inspector general report found that the Social Security Administration sent 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each to people who were either dead or incarcerated, though around half of them were returned.

The Florida Department of Transportation received $3.4 million from the stimulus bill to fund a way for turtles to cross a busy highway. The turtle bridge was one of 100 stimulus-funded projects that Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma mentioned in a roundup of what he saw as wasteful uses of stimulus tax money.

Solyndra was not the only politically connected company to receive Department of Energy loans. Tesla Motors, whose CEO Elon Musk was a major donor to Obama’s election campaign, also got hundreds of millions of dollars from stimulus loan programs.

Biden remains consistent in being unconcerned about critics of how stimulus money was spent. In the 2012 vice presidential debate, his opponent, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, accused the administration of spending the stimulus on special interests and “crony capitalism.” Biden scoffed, pointing to a Republican report that found the Solyndra loan was not politically motivated.

“They found no evidence of cronyism,” Biden said.

In this election, Biden is on track to find himself in the opposite position of where he was in 2012 if he attacks Trump on coronavirus stimulus cronyism, and Trump avoids the issue.