A House Republican has proposed a bill that would disassemble President Joe Biden’s Climate Corps initiative.
The initiative, announced as part of the Investing in America agenda, aims to train more than 20,000 young Americans in climate-related skills, creating pathways to jobs in the clean energy and climate change sectors.
Mr. Good said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times that his bill would fight back against the “radical environmental agenda” by defunding the corps.
“Americans are struggling to make ends meet because of Bidenomics. Instead of recognizing that family budgets are already stretched thin by sky-high energy prices, President Biden is focused on deploying a climate army that will increase regulatory burdens on business owners and drive inflation across the economy even higher,” he said in the statement.
“My bill will fight Biden’s climate extremism and continue our work towards the goal of American energy independence.”
“President Biden and Democrats’ continued climate change-fueled war on American energy independence will cost over $500 billion in climate spending with the passage of bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Acceleration Act,” the statement reads.
On Sept. 18, a coalition of left-leaning lawmakers, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y), and Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), sent a letter to the White House urging President Biden to establish the climate program through executive action.
A number of leading Republicans formally responded to the executive action on Oct. 13 by beginning an inquiry into the American Climate Corps.
Lawmakers from the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the CEO of AmeriCorps raising questions about the cost of the program, “including the extent to which the [American Climate Corps] will redirect funds from other AmeriCorps programs or any other existing federal agencies and programs.”
“According to the announcement, as the nexus of the ACC for federal agencies, AmeriCorps seems poised to facilitate the flow of an unspecified sum of federal taxpayer dollars to unknown individuals and entities. It is unclear where these funds are coming from and for what purposes they will be used.”
The committee cited their efforts to “combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government and to safeguard taxpayer dollars” as the motivation for the inquiry.
White House officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.