Former President Joe Biden‘s use of the autopen and his mental state during major White House green energy policy announcements will be aired out in Congress on Wednesday.
In a hearing titled “NGOs gone wild,” the House Oversight Committee will parse claims that the Biden administration handed out billions of dollars to left-leaning nongovernmental organizations and that an autopen was used to sign sweeping executive orders that Biden never spoke about publicly.
Part of the hearing will center on new reports that Biden issued major climate policy changes via executive action without ever saying anything about it on the record, raising questions about his awareness of the orders.
“President Biden didn’t speak a lot to the press to begin with,” Power the Future President Daniel Turner said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “But we couldn’t even find any instance of Joe Biden in his own words, in his own voice, speaking about having signed [these executive orders], the need for it, the purpose of it, et cetera.”
Thus, the only evidence the group could find was the orders themselves, which Turner’s group said were signed using an autopen device.
Those findings fold into the wider autopen accusations Republicans are leveling at Biden, questioning whether he coordinated or was even aware of his own administration’s actions. Aside from Congress, the Justice Department is also investigating Biden’s use of the autopen when he signed pardons, including those involving political allies and family members.
Power the Future advocates energy industry workers and thus focuses on Biden’s energy and climate change-related actions.
It found eight actions that it said Biden signed but never spoke about publicly.
The actions included an offshore drilling ban that covered 625 million acres of the outer continent shelf, a commitment for the entire federal government to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2050 and require carbon-free electricity by 2030, a memo invoking the Defense Product Act to push solar panels and heat pumps, an arctic drilling ban, and a leasing requirement for artificial intelligence data centers to be powered using “clean energy.”
Other actions included giving preferential federal hiring treatment to AmeriCorps alumni, creating a “Climate Change Support Office” within the federal bureaucracy, and requiring all federal agencies to assess climate-related financial risk.
“These are major, major, consequential decisions, and Joe Biden never spoke about them,” Turner said.
The offshore drilling ban was issued on Jan. 6, 2025, in the waning days of Biden’s presidency. It covered 250 million acres off the West Coast and 44 million acres in Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. The announcement included a written statement from the president and a White House fact sheet.
Biden visited New Orleans that day to pay respects to the victims of a New Year’s Day attack that killed 14 people and injured others. However, he did not mention the vast drilling ban.
Similarly, the executive order on clean energy in data centers was issued on Jan. 14, less than a week before Biden left the White House, and the AmeriCorps EO came two days later.
The Defense Production Act order was authorized on June 6, 2022, and while former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre publicly defended it in a news briefing, Biden did not have any public events scheduled that day.
Turner, in researching the matter, was particularly struck by a story House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told after meeting with Biden late last year.
According to Johnson, he tried to confront Biden about a liquid natural gas export ban, but the former president insisted he hadn’t signed one. The initial reaction to that claim was that Biden had forgotten about signing the ban, but Turner said he now wonders if Biden ever had knowledge of signing it at all.
President Donald Trump has now overturned all eight of the executive actions in question. Representatives for Biden did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.
That won’t be the only focus of the hearing.
The committee will also hash out billions of taxpayer dollars going toward NGOs.
Turner’s written testimony holds that Jahi Wise, a staffer from an NGO called the Coalition for Green Capital, joined the Biden Environmental Protection Agency to direct $27 billion in green energy funding. Once appointed, he steered $5 billion in grants back to the Coalition for Green Capital.
Another group, Power Forward Communities, was only a few months old when it received nearly $9 billion in taxpayer dollars to use as it saw fit. Of that total, $2 billion went to a group affiliated with former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which had only $100 in its bank account.
Also testifying will be Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian, who will speak on what he said are Biden administration grants to NGOs that helped facilitate illegal immigration.
“[An NGO] provided millions of intending illegal border-crossers with ‘cash-based interventions’ in the form of debit cards and even cash in envelopes, as well as legal coaching that involved narrative engineering for fraudulent asylum claims, transportation facilitation, food, camping equipment, trail advice, and lodging assistance,’ Krikorian’s written testimony says.
While the number of people attempting to cross the border has plummeted since Trump took office, Krikorian said the network is ready to spring back into action should a new occupant enter the White House in a few years.
The Trump administration has largely echoed those concerns.
For example, Trump’s chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said in February that he was stunned to learn how much government money went to “far-left NGOs” under the Biden administration.
“In a very literal sense, America’s state-owned enterprises are left-wing nonprofits,” he told reporters outside the White House. “Other countries, their state-owned enterprises are like steel companies, right? Or oil companies. In America, we learned our state-owned enterprises are radical left nonprofits.”
In a similar vein, Vice President JD Vance hit back at criticism of his immigration stance from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, saying that organization received “over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants.”
THE LONG CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY OF THE BIDEN AUTOPEN
“Are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said. “We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people.”
The hearing begins Wednesday at 2 p.m.