“Solyndra” is a byword for the pitfalls of corporate welfare and industrial policy. The Obama administration gave the solar-energy company over $500 million as part of its economic stimulus program during the recovery from the Great Recession. Solyndra went out of business two years later. Greg Pollowitz covered it from start to finish for NR.
NR’s editorial from 2011 sums up the Solyndra debacle:
It made solar panels, a product so green that Democrats could almost forget that this was a profit-oriented corporation, backed by venture capitalists, oil money, and private-equity funds, and led by a former Intel executive. The firm was in Nancy Pelosi’s back yard, and it was looking to expand, with plans to build a factory for the mass production of its photovoltaic cells. But the firm was not thriving, and those venture capitalists were not eager to put their own money on the line for that new facility. So they put your money on the line, instead.
The Government Accountability Office would later single out the Solyndra deal as an example of the government’s failing to fully vet such arrangements before approving the loan guarantees. With all those stimulus dollars burning a hole in its pocket, the Obama administration was overeager to get them spent. “If you don’t have really strong processes in place, and if you’re under pressure to get a lot of these dollars allocated, you can make unproductive decisions and ones that ultimately put taxpayers’ dollars at risk,” GAO analyst Franklin Rusco said. In fact, the administration announced its commitment to the loan guarantees before the required outside reviews were even in hand.
So the government learned from this verifiable disaster, right?
Well, the “former Intel executive” mentioned in the editorial was Brian Harrison, who was Solyndra’s CEO in 2010 and 2011. What’s Brian Harrison up to these days?
He’s the president of TSMC Arizona — the U.S. subsidiary of the Taiwanese semiconductor company that was recently awarded $6.6 billion from the CHIPS Act. “Harrison, who is overseeing TSMC’s projects in Arizona, said he was involved in securing the federal financing in a media interview last August,” reports the Washington Free Beacon.
Free-market advocates will sometimes be mocked for comparing too many government programs to Solyndra. But can you blame us when, 13 years later, the federal government is giving more than ten times as much money to a company led by Solyndra’s former CEO?