Officials at the White House and the Department of Energy were deeply divided over the financial viability of the now-bankrupt solar panel-maker Solyndra as they worked together on DOE’s loan guarantee program, and on planning President Obama’s visit to the company in 2010, according to a Democratic House subcommittee memo released Monday that summarizes the findings of a document dump from the White House Office of Management and Budget on the matter.
The memo was authored by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ Democratic staff and sent out to all of the subcommittees’ Democratic members, giving them a characterization of the nature of the conversation between OMB and DOE officials as they continued to monitor Solyndra’s progress and debated the future of the DOE’s loan guarantee program.
According to the memo, e-mails from OMB analysts and Larry Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council, show OMB officials being highly skeptical of Solyndra’s sustainability as a business, with DOE officials continually defending it.
In the meantime, White House officials were receiving rosy reports about Solyndra from its lobbying group, the Glover Park Group.
“In hindsight, it is apparent that the predictions of officials at OMB about Solyndra were right and those of the officials at DOE were wrong,” wrote the committee staff. “But that does not mean the decision to rely on DOE’s advice was wrong at the time.”
Republicans on the committee have used the documents and e-mails to charge the Obama administration with favoritism regarding Solyndra’s $535 million loan guarantee, saying that the administration favored Solyndra because it was connected to a fundraiser.
But the e-mails, which have not been publicly released, show that the analysts working on monitoring the deal and the DOE’s loan guarantee program worried that Solyndra was going to go belly up, according to the memo summarizing the memos.
One unnamed OMB official joked in an e-mail when he heard about President Obama’s planned visit to Solyndra in Fremont, Calif.:
“Hope it doesn’t default before then.”
The entire memo is available here.
