Former President Joe Biden has been out of office for months.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump officials from continuing to discover government and taxpayer-funded efforts designed to bankroll the lifestyles of Biden and his inner circle.
Last week, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the shut down another Biden-led slush fund worth as much as $7.4 billion in taxpayer money.
The program in question is a non-profit called “Natcast”, which in one of Biden’s moved before leaving the White House, signed an agreement to manage the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) under the direction of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
At the time, the award was supposed to be to implement research funding appropriated under the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 U.S. law that provides over $280 billion for research and manufacturing.
However, from the jump, Natcast was stacked with former Biden employees who profited off of the venture and was awarded the job without anything resembling fair and open competition. Natcast even announced grant awardees three months before it got the job of managing NSTC.
Lutnick outlined exactly why the operation was shut down in an open letter to the public.
CLAWBACK $7.4 BILLION
The Biden administration created a new entity called Natcast as a slush fund, siphoning billions in taxpayer dollars at the expense of American innovation and national security.
Commerce is clawing back more than $7.4B in tax dollars from this illegal,… pic.twitter.com/iHOBUI1C4j
— Howard Lutnick (@howardlutnick) August 25, 2025
An excerpt from Lutnick’s letter included:
“Rather than establishing the NSTC at the Department, however, Biden Administration officials stood up an entirely new, unaccountable entity—Natcast—to operate the NSTC’s public private-sector consortium on the Commerce Department’s behalf using taxpayer funds. In an effort to skirt clear legal restrictions prohibiting government agencies from establishing corporations, the Biden-era Commerce Department officials handpicked individuals friendly to the Biden Administration to serve on a “Selection Committee” that, in turn, chose who would form the entity that the Department anticipated would serve as the operator of the NSTC.
The Selection Committee included Jason Matheny (who held several roles in the Biden White House), Don Rosenberg (a partner at a venture capital firm whose portfolio companies received at least $117 million in federal grants), and Brenda Wilkerson (a self-described advocate for “social justice for underrepresented communities in technology”).
The Biden Administration then stacked Natcast with former Biden officials. The majority of Natcast’s executives, and a few of its trustees, previously held formal positions either within the Commerce Department itself or as members of the Industrial Advisory Committee, which advised the Commerce Department on CHIPS Act implementation. Documents show the Biden Administration even went so far as to provide Natcast’s trustees with detailed legal and corporate guidance that included recommended bylaws and the state of incorporation—which were readily adopted and implemented. In taking these actions to establish Natcast, the Biden Administration officials violated the Government Corporation Control Act—which forbids the government from establishing an entity to act on behalf of an agency, unless a specific provision of law permits it to do so.”