Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,
The battery recycler Ascend Elements was riding high in 2023, flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
The seed money provided to the Massachusetts company, which launched in 2017, was one of several large bets the Biden administration placed on the green future as it essentially created a venture capital arm at the Department of Energy and other agencies. In the movies, VCs almost always score big through their early investments in future behemoths (e.g., PayPal or Meta when it was Facebook). In real life, those jackpots are the exception, not the rule - many of the deals go south.
Alas, Washington isn't Hollywood, and the government isn't spending celluloid dollars. In April, Ascend Elements filed for bankruptcy, leaving U.S. taxpayers out nearly $320 million.
Government funding of private companies is receiving new scrutiny as the Trump administration is upping the ante on such efforts by demanding that the feds receive an equity stake for their largesse. While this approach is leading the government into uncharted waters, experts say the operative concept - using taxpayer money to make risky bets on private companies - has a long and troub
