Ex-Obama Campaigner Got Board Seat At EPA ‘Gold Bars’ Winner After His Green Org Failed To Deliver On Big Promises

A former Obama campaigner now on the board of an environmental organization picked to receive billions by the Biden administration previously founded a green company that failed to deliver on big promises in multiple cities.

Donnel Baird — who worked for the 2012 Obama campaign on behalf of the Service Employees International Union before founding BlocPower, a building decarbonization company — joined the board of the Coalition for Green Capital (CGC) in December 2022, a group picked by the Biden EPA in April 2024 to receive about $5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). BlocPower made headlines in 2021 when the company partnered with Ithaca, New York, to decarbonize 6,000 buildings in the liberal city, but the company only completed a handful of projects in town before sunsetting its partnership and effectively “disappearing” from the scene, according to local outlet WSKG.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris recognized BlocPower as an “emerging leader” in the green tech space in 2023, and Baird’s biography page on CGC’s website touts BlocPower as “a startup that markets, finances and installs solar and energy efficiency technology to help houses of worship, non-profits, small businesses and multifamily projects to slash their energy costs.”

Moreover, Baird participated in a July 2024 virtual fundraiser for Harris in which he highlighted the then-vice president’s opposition to fracking, a position her campaign team tried to obfuscate throughout the 2024 presidential race, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

CGC, BlocPower and Baird did not respond to requests for comment.

While BlocPower garnered substantial fanfare from the media upon launching its 2021 initiative to electrify Ithaca’s buildings, the initiative began to falter shortly thereafter as key proponents in local government quit their jobs and worsening economic conditions complicated the organization’s business plans, according to The American Prospect. Other corporations that were initially supposed to join BlocPower’s efforts as part of a larger coalition never ended up following through, leaving BlocPower as essentially the only entity working to see through Ithaca’s building electrification push by the end of 2022, according to WSKG.

Ithaca only announced the first ten commercial buildings that would undergo BlocPower’s electrification transformation in January 2024, according to WSKG. The company claimed at the time that it completed electrification projects around town and trained several people to work green jobs, but BlocPower later appears to have deleted the release announcing that progress from its website after WSKG reached out to the company, the outlet reported.

By November 2024, Baird had left BlocPower as the company furloughed its staff in Ithaca and ended its partnerships in the Ithaca area, according to WSKG.

BlocPower ultimately never received payment for the project because it failed to electrify the 200 buildings needed to unlock compensation under its agreements with the city, according to WSKG.

BlocPower has also set up partnerships in California cities like Menlo Park and Oakland, as well as Denver and a small town in New Hampshire, though the Denver partnership was the company’s only active deal as of January 2025, according to WSKG. The company’s website claims that BlocPower “has completed over 1,200 measures in more than 1,100 buildings across the nation, improving energy efficiency, creating green jobs, and enhancing economic opportunities for underserved communities, impacting the lives of nearly 5,000 families” since its founding in 2014.

The American Prospect asked Baird to refer the outlet to “satisfied customers” who had realized savings from increasing a building’s energy efficiency in New York using BlocPower, and also to be referred to a case study of BlocPower’s complex business model. Baird declined to provide either.

The company also found a home in New York City under the de Blasio and Adams administrations, according to Gothamist. BlocPower landed a combined $300 million from the city under the administrations of former Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor Eric Adams to spend on green jobs training efforts and violence prevention work in the city, with New York City ultimately paying out at least $182 million.

BlocPower’s green jobs training program was “established in a matter of weeks in the summer of 2021,” offering a mix of social services and paid instruction for developing construction, electrical and HVAC skills with a particular focus in neighborhoods plagued by high rates of gun violence, according to Gothamist.

While some individuals say they received the training, clear signs of trouble had emerged in BlocPower’s relationship with New York City by the end of 2024: subcontractors were complaining that they were not getting paid, and city officials opted against renewing the program that same year because they believed that BlocPower was not adequately reporting information about the program’s performance.

The company disputed the city’s position, telling Gothamist that it did release progress reports on a regular basis and received additional contracts from the city because it had successfully stood up its program. Notably, a third-party study commissioned by the city found that both the city and BlocPower did not establish metrics to determine or define successful outcomes for the New York City green jobs program.

Today, Baird sits on CGC’s board of directors alongside numerous Democrat Party insiders and donors. While the Biden EPA handpicked CGC and other green groups laden with politically-connected officials to receive billions, the Trump EPA has moved to terminate the underlying grant agreements and claw back as much as possible, with the matter currently pending in court.

In public communications addressing the GGRF, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has frequently referenced a video produced by conservative activist group Project Veritas, in which a Biden EPA official likened the agency’s rush to get GGRF funding out the door before the arrival of a new administration to tossing “gold bars off the Titanic.”

The FBI and the Justice Department are now probing the GGRF on the grounds that the program may have been involved in the waste, fraud or abuse of taxpayer funds.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)

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