Thomas Catrenacci of the Washington Free Beacon documents another controversial use of taxpayer money.
Rewiring America, the climate group where Democratic activist Stacey Abrams served as senior counsel, quietly banked more than $5 million in federal climate funding shortly before the Trump administration axed the Biden-era grant earlier this year, according to tax documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. They suggest that Abrams played a larger role in obtaining the grant than she claimed.
The $5 million marked the initial tranche of a $2 billion grant the Environmental Protection Agency awarded in April 2024 to a different group, Power Forward Communities, that oversees a Rewiring America-led coalition. When a February Free Beacon report revealed Power Forward Communities’s ties to Abrams—prompting EPA administrator Lee Zeldin to cancel the grant—Abrams argued that she had no affiliation with the group and played a negligible role in obtaining the grant.
The tax documents contradict Abrams’s claims. They show that, of the $9.5 million Power Forward Communities received from the EPA by the end of 2024, more than half went to Abrams’s Rewiring America. Power Forward Communities reported the grant funding was its sole source of revenue last year, indicating that it acted as a pass-through established to distribute taxpayer funds to Rewiring America. It disbursed the funding to Rewiring America as Abrams served as its senior counsel and senior adviser, a role she held between March 2023 and early 2025.
At the time, the group’s director of partnerships, Ian Magruder, said Abrams “played a pivotal role” in securing the EPA grant. But Power Forward Communities described its relationship with Rewiring America—and Abrams—differently when it sued the EPA over Zeldin’s grant cancellation. …
… In a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s cancellation of the grant, Power Forward Communities said its relationship with Abrams was “alleged.”
Zeldin said the newly filed tax forms show that the Biden administration’s decision to award billions of dollars to Power Forward Communities was indeed political.
