Department of Government Efficiency co-chair Vivek Ramaswamy is going to put President Joe Biden’s “last-minute spending spree” under a microscope. He claims the funding awarded months before a power transition is inappropriate and will receive special scrutiny.
High on his list of spending to claw back is a $6.6 billion loan to EV maker Rivian from the Department of Energy, which was announced in November 2024. Rivian is a rival to Tesla, where DOGE co-chair Elon Musk serves as CEO.
“Anybody who’s offering recommendations, you should always have a skeptical lens to look at what are their motivations for making that recommendation,” Ramaswamy said about conflicts of interest during CNBC’s CFO Council Summit Wednesday, Dec. 4. “I say that’s the best advice I’d give the public: Always be skeptical when somebody’s making a recommendation.”
During a Q&A at the event, Ramaswamy said he doesn’t believe the loan to Rivian will be paid back.
The loan in question will be used to build a factory in Georgia. It won’t be finalized until both the Energy Department and Rivian sign off on the contract. The New York Times reported it is expected to happen before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The DOE said its “Loan Programs Office provides attractive debt financing for high-impact, large-scale energy infrastructure projects in the United States.”
To date, the Energy Department has financed $44 billion in loans while taking $1 billion in losses. These loans become the government’s responsibility if a company goes bankrupt. The Obama administration’s loan to solar panel company Solyndra is a prime example. In that case, taxpayers took a half-billion-dollar hit.
Ramaswamy says no program will escape DOGE, including “last minute [Inflation Reduction Act], CHIPS Act, and countless other federal spending sprees authorized under Biden.”
Those pieces of legislation are two of the biggest passed during the Biden administration. After Trump won the presidential election, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke on the administration’s race against the clock.
“I’d like to have, really, almost all the money obligated by the time we leave,” Raimondo told Politico at the time. “That’s the goal. And I certainly want to have all the major announcements done as it relates to the big, leading-edge companies, and that’s our goal, and we’re working as hard as we can to make it happen.”
Ramaswamy took issue with the commerce secretary’s plan.
Biden’s Commerce Secretary @SecRaimondo says Jan 20 is “a clear deadline” for pushing $$ out the door: “I’d like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave.” This is highly inappropriate: they’re accelerating spending ahead of the transition of power. https://t.co/K3igDStJXS
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 26, 2024
“This is highly inappropriate,” he posted on X. “They’re accelerating spending ahead of the transition of power.”
In most cases, the funding has already been appropriated as part of large legislation or in funding to agencies that disperse the money. Only Congress has the authority to change appropriations. It remains unclear what authority DOGE would have to claw back those funds. On Thursday, Dec. 5, Ramaswamy and Musk pitched DOGE to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
On Wednesday, Ramaswamy compared Biden’s spending to a company firing an executive, who in their final days, approved budgetary items that hadn’t been doled out.
For his part, when Trump was a lame duck president following the 2020 election, he signed a new $2.3 trillion spending bill to fund the government, which included $900 billion in COVID-19 relief.
