Years before becoming famous as an advocate of fiscal restraint, Paul Ryan supported a now-controversial Energy Department loan program aimed at developing greener cars — and even called for DOE to hand out lump-sum payments to companies.
The department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program doesn’t make lump-sum payments, instead doling out the money incrementally to ensure that recipients meet financial and performance milestones along the way. Energy Department officials have stressed in recent months that the tactic is a key part of their due diligence process, aimed at monitoring loan recipients’ financial stability.
But Ryan called for a different strategy in an October 2008 letter to then-Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman outlining a series of steps the department should take as it finalized the ATVM loan program. The letter, obtained by POLITICO, calls for “disbursement flexibility” aimed at “ensuring access to the approved lump-sum versus incremental access.”
Ryan campaign spokesman Brendan Buck said Monday that the Wisconsin Republican wasn’t trying to water down the program’s safeguards.
“Nothing in the letter suggests reduced or revised thresholds for qualifying funds,” Buck said by email. “The flexibility related solely to funding after a company had been approved as a viable recipient.”
Buck also defended Ryan’s support for the loan program, which has become a target for some Republicans following the travails of loan recipient Fisker Automotive.
“Congressman Ryan believed redirecting these pre-existing funds to aid the American auto industry was a better solution than what the White House ultimately did — use TARP to pick winners and losers,” Buck added.
The 2008 letter laid out a number of other factors the Energy Department should consider when approving ATVM loans. They include prioritizing projects that have ceased production or closed down. The letter also was signed by three Wisconsin Democrats: Sen. Herb Kohl, then-Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. Tammy Baldwin.
Republicans have taken aim at the ATVM loan program as part of broader attacks on the administration’s clean-energy investments. Ryan has specifically criticized the Energy Department for issuing a $529 million loan in April 2010 to Fisker under the ATVM program.
“I would just say, if you take a look at the president’s policies, he calls them investments. It’s borrowing money and spending money through Washington, picking winners and losers, spending money on favorite people like Solyndra or Fisker,” Ryan said on CBS’s “This Morning” earlier this month. “Picking winners and losers in the economy through spending, through tax breaks, through regulations does not work.”
Republicans allege Fisker used the loan money to produce its high-end Karma electric vehicle in Finland, and hence Obama is creating jobs overseas. But both DOE and the company have said the loan money was used in the United States for design and parts manufacturing.
Ryan admitted last month that his office sent letters supporting requests for stimulus money for energy projects in his district even though he is a leading critic of the stimulus law. He wrote to the Energy Department in 2009 seeking stimulus money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies.
Ryan initially denied having made the 2009 requests, then acknowledged it.
“After having these letters called to my attention, I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled,” Ryan said in a statement last month. “This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier. But they should have been handled differently, and I take responsibility for that