There were many ridiculous things about President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, none more embarrassing than Biden’s claim that people could lower energy prices by weatherizing our homes.
This is an old Democratic hobbyhorse. President Barack Obama routinely talked about “weatherizing homes” throughout his 2008 presidential campaign and during his administration. Obama’s stimulus plan even included $5 billion for a program to do exactly that.
How did that turn out?
Not so well. As then-Daily Show host Jon Stewart famously noted, in then-Vice President Biden’s home state of Delaware, the home weatherization program was suspended due to “gross mismanagement and fraudulent activity.” This gross mismanagement and fraudulent activity all took place after Biden himself was put in charge of making sure the weatherization funds were not misspent.
“Joe Biden couldn’t even control fraudulent activity in his own state,” Stewart said, “a state so small you could actually weatherize it.”
Comedians weren’t the only ones critical of Obama’s weatherization program, again a program that Biden was personally assigned to guarantee the quality of. Energy Department Inspector General Gregory Friedman testified he found “significant problems with workmanship quality, cost controls, and performance monitoring of grantees and contractors.”
“In fact,” Friedman said, “Recovery Act funds were used to purchase common items such as smoke alarms, thermostats, and fire extinguishers at costs exceeding retail by as much as 200%.”
Spending billions on overpriced smoke alarms and fire extinguishers isn’t going to lower our nation’s energy costs. Instead of funding wasteful Green New Deal programs, Biden should commit to expanding energy production on public lands and building new nuclear power plants.
Anything else would be a joke.
