A multi-billion-dollar nuclear energy venture that has churned through billions in federal funds despite having no business plan has been pumped full of tax dollars by high-profile Republican critics of government waste.
Public support for the United States Enrichment Corp. far exceeds what was lost on the infamous Solyndra solar energy boondoggle, and funding provided ostensibly to build a new plant will almost certainly yield the same results for taxpayers — nothing.
The company has over $2 billion in debts and liabilities and is valued at only $28 million on the stock market.
Company executives have acknowledged to shareholders that the firm has no viable business plan and lacks financing to build its proposed American Centrifuge plant — even as it collects money from the government as a down payment.
Still, in January 2012 — only days after Solyndra executives pleaded the Fifth Amendment during rancorous congressional hearings — House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans wrote to the Department of Energy pleading for funds for USEC through the same federal loan program that provided backing for Solyndra.
The company has asked DOE for a $2 billion loan guarantee towards the American Centrifuge project's $4 billion estimated total cost.
The company’s main plant, which is now being vacated, is in Kentucky, home of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and in a town represented by Rep. Ed Whitfield, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on energy and power.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers is also a Kentucky Republican. Kentucky's other senator, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, is yet another Republican USEC backer.
Enrichment at the public till
How Republicans - and some Democrats - steered billions to a failing privatized arm of the government many times the size of Solyndra, executives profited, and taxpayers lost.
Part One: Feds invested billions in energy firm virtually sure to fail
Part Two: Privatizing energy project led to rich bureaucrats, drained federal coffers
Part Three: Republican leaders steered billions in pork to failing company in home states
See the whole series and view photos of the nuclear plant spanning decades, a real-time stock ticker, documents and salaries here.
The company now hopes to move to Piketon, Ohio, in a politically sensitive swing county in the state from which Boehner hails.
Beginning with the Tea Party-fueled takeover of the House in the 2010 elections, Rogers has promoted himself as the “enforcer” of a House ban on earmarks, the practice of shoveling federal funds to home districts without votes by the full Congress.
Many Republicans condemn earmarks as wasteful and often can lead to projects such as Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere.”
Rogers’ spokesman said the USEC bills he backed were requested by the president, not congressionally initiated, and thus weren’t earmarks.
Yet no fewer than 57 bills, virtually all from Republicans, have been written containing various carveouts, additional protections and targeted incentives for USEC.
In May 2011, for example, McConnell and Paul offered a bill that would have directed the Department of Energy to use federal funds to keep the for-profit company’s antiquated and inefficient Kentucky plant operation.al
That particular bill, which a McConnell spokesman said “would have created 15 years-worth of uranium for U.S. national security purposes and kept 1,200 jobs in Kentucky,” died in committee, but USEC was nonetheless the recipient of countless other appropriations, including in the fiscal year 2014 budget.
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, one of the few in Congress to push back against such appropriations, calls USEC “the United States Earmark Corporation.”
Paul’s office did not return a request for comment.
USEC’s stock prices have fallen steadily for years, and most recently so sharply that the decline threatens the firm's continued listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
But that didn’t stop USEC's Republican backers from steering the government towards it. read more at:
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