Biden Admin. Climate Plan: Turning Activists Into Bureaucrats On Taxpayer Dime

Floor Speech

"The Biden Administration announced yesterday that it is seeking new recruits in its war on affordable and reliable American energy -- to fill the ranks of a new program called the American Climate Corps.

While the Administration works overtime to freeze sensible development like energy pipelines, its latest initiative would essentially set up a taxpayer-funded pipeline for turning climate activists into climate bureaucrats.

Now, President Biden's nostalgia for FDR's New Deal is well documented. So, setting aside the absurdity of Washington Democrats' fixation with the Green New Deal, it would be hard to imagine an economic moment less well suited to a new Depression-era work program.

This isn't the early 1930s, when the American people were up against high unemployment and low inflation. In fact, what Democrats' runaway spending has dumped on working families today is just the opposite. For two years now, we've seen historic inflation and a record labor shortage.

This is such a profoundly tone-deaf idea, it couldn't even earn the support of the President's own party here in the Senate! During votes on Democrats' so-called Inflation Reduction Act last year, not a single one of our colleagues joined Senator Sanders in voting for his amendment to create a climate work project on the taxpayer's dime.

Apparently that hasn't deterred President Biden, or the left-wing activists behind the wheel of his Administration's energy policies.

As working families struggle to afford gas, electricity, and groceries, the advice from wealthy blue-state liberals is apparently to shell out for an expensive electric car and foot the bill for the so-called Climate Corps.

There's no Hoover Dam or Lincoln Tunnel on the other side of this nonsense spending. Just Potemkin jobs and a new make-work program when there's plenty of work to go around.

So Mr. President, activists are calling it "climate justice'. But it doesn't sound like justice to the working families just trying to get by on President Biden's watch."

Source