To Protect Climate Money, Obama Stashed It Where It’s Hard to Find
- Obama’s aides spread money across the government, eluding cuts
- Most recent estimate puts tab at $77 billion from 2008-2013
What to Expect From Trump on Climate Change
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President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies -- in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.