Stacey Abrams didn’t admit to using $2 billion from EPA to buy votes in Georgia

Days after President Donald Trump called out Stacey Abrams in his March 4 speech to Congress, Abrams defended herself in an interview on MSNBC’s "All In with Chris Hayes."

Some social media users shared the March 6 interview as evidence she admitted to wrongdoing.

"Stacey Abrams admits the $2 billion Joe Biden’s EPA gave her was used to buy votes of people in Georgia by purchasing them new appliances," a March 9 Facebook post read. 

(Screenshot from Facebook)

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The interview does not show Abrams admitting to using $2 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency to buy votes. In the interview, she spoke about the Power Forward Communities coalition, which included the nonprofit Rewiring America as one of its five members. Abrams, a lawyer, was involved in Rewiring America in 2023 and 2024 as senior counsel, but there’s been no proof she received money from that grant.

PolitiFact has debunked two claims related to this grant. Abrams did not steal $2 billion from taxpayers, nor did she "head up" a coalition that received that grant, as Trump claimed.

Hayes played a clip of Trump’s March 4 speech to Congress, when he claimed $1.9 billion went to a "recently created decarbonization of homes committee" headed by Abrams. Discussing Trump’s claim, Abrams told Hayes about the program Vitalizing DeSoto, which she said she led in 2023 and 2024. DeSoto is a small Georgia town south of Atlanta.

"We worked in a tiny town in south Georgia to demonstrate that by replacing energy inefficient appliances with efficient appliances, you can lower your cost. And in fact, we accomplished that. For 75% of the community, they got appliances that are lowering their bills right now," Abrams said.

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She continued, "Based on that program, a coalition of organizations, famous organizations, came together and said to the EPA, if we can do this here, we can do this for millions more Americans. Let us invest the money of America in lowering the cost for Americans. And the EPA said, ‘okay, great, go for it.’"

The Facebook post’s clip stopped there.

A look at the full interview shows Abrams went on to say, "They are angry about the fact that it is Democrats who know how to serve the American people and lower their prices." 

She didn’t admit to using $2 billion to "buy votes," as the post claimed. 

Abrams joined Rewiring America in 2023. The same year, Rewiring America joined four other organizations to form the Power Forward Communities coalition, which aimed to "apply for $9.5 billion from the IRA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) for residential decarbonization and electrification."

Abrams left Rewiring America at the end of 2024. In April that year, the EPA awarded the Power Forward Communities coalition $2 billion to build and lead a program to reduce costs for single-family and multi-family housing owners and developers. 

Abrams spokesperson Joshua Karp told PolitiFact she was not involved in Power Forward Communities beyond her role at Rewiring America. Power Forward Communities CEO Tim Mayopoulos told Politico Abrams "has not received a penny of this EPA grant."

Abrams told CNN March 5, "I did not work for the entity that received the grant, ultimately. I worked for one of the partner organizations, but I was very much a part of pushing and showing America that we have the ability to lower prices."

In a March 9 CNN interview, she said, "It’s a program that went through all of the requisite legal requirements."

In her MSNBC interview, Abrams defended a grant that aimed to replace home appliances across the country with more energy efficient appliances. The grant went to a coalition of five organizations, one of which she worked for as an attorney. She didn’t admit that she used $2 billion from the EPA to buy votes of people in Georgia. We rate that claim False.

CORRECTION, March 17, 2025: This story has been updated to correct a typo in the "If your time is short" section about Vitalizing DeSoto.