Senior fellow Todd Moss' piece on Solyndra and foreign aid was featured in the Huffington Post.
From the Blog
As the troubling details of the Department of Energy's loan program continue to roll out, I can't help but think of another beleaguered agency ... USAID. And, I also wonder if, in thinking how to generate new clean energy technology at home, we might also find insights to better promote development abroad? Here's how:
Congressional inquiries into Solyndra's collapse are asking about how half a billion dollars of public money was lost, focusing on potential conflicts of interest, how political influence may have contaminated the loan decision, and how bureaucrats within one agency (DoE, which ran the program and was under massive pressure to show progress on clean energy and to push money out the door) ignored red flags and concerns from other agencies (Treasury, OMB). Anger from Capitol Hill is understandable, but the charges of cronyism or mistakes by civil servants aren't, to my mind, the real story here -- these problems were utterly predictable given the nature of the solar panel market and the structure of the loan program. The real worry is why such difficult investment decisions were in the hands of DoE in the first place.
The clean energy loan program was: (a) tasking civil servants to use public money to create something totally new in a complex highly unpredictable environment; (b) under intense pressure to show rapid results; and (c) highly scrutinized for any specific mistakes. If this isn't a perfect recipe for failure, I don't know what is. In fact, given these three conditions, it's shocking that we would even expect any other outcome.