After spending nearly $3 billion over the last dozen years, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation is working to claw back about $21.9 million in failed corporate welfare deals.

So far, the agency headed by appointees of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has recovered roughly $18.3 million, though the MEDC is shielding other failures by renegotiating some of its biggest taxpayer-funded incentives when companies fail to meet hiring and investment metrics, according to The Detroit News.

“I think it’s important to recognize, instead of acknowledging failures, they just renegotiate the contract on what they’re able to accomplish,” state Rep. Jay DeBoyer, the Clay Twp. Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, told the news site. “Imagine doing that with your kid when it comes to doing their chores.”

The data follows a request from DeBoyer earlier this month as his committee works to assess the performance of the state’s largest business incentive programs, which Whitmer and select lawmakers have leveraged to court big business, much of it centered on the electric vehicle industry.

The review is part of a broader effort by House Republicans to shift funding from the taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies to fulfill Whitmer’s campaign promise to “fix the damn roads.”

Records show the Michigan Business Development Program, launched in 2012, has provided 271 businesses a total of $289.8 million in incentives for an expected investment of $10.2 billion.

Sixty-two or 23% of those deals were canceled or are in repayment because grantees did not fulfill their requirements, while another 21 are in default or have declared bankruptcy. Sixty-seven, or about a quarter, were contracted last year, according to records reviewed by The News.

MEDC has identified $21.9 million in clawbacks for that program, and has collected $18.3 million so far, the MEDC told DeBoyer.

A separate Michigan Community Revitalization Program that also launched in 2012 has doled out another $365 million for 172 grants and loans to incentivize private investment in historic or brownfield sites, and the MEDC report does not detail if any are in default.

A third business incentive program created by lawmakers in 2021 known as the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve committed another $2.8 billion to court massive investments in the EV and renewable energy industries. While both Ford and General Motors, the two biggest beneficiaries of SOAR funds, have scaled back their investments, Whitmer’s MEDC has not worked to claw back the funds, opting instead to renegotiate those contracts, corporation spokesman Otie McKinley told The News.

“There have been no clawback provisions triggered for SOAR projects to date,” McKinley said. “In some cases, awards have not yet been fully disbursed.”

The MEDC in July reduced incentives for Ford after the company shaved $1 billion off its planned $3.5 billion investment in a new BlueOval Battery Park in Marshall. That project, a partnership with the Chinese Communist Party-linked Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. had already faced opposition from Republicans and local residents, and the decision to scale back prompted calls from lawmakers to get taxpayers their money back.

“These latest developments underscore what I’ve been saying all along — projects like this require much stricter oversight,” said state Rep. Sarah Lightner, R-Springport. “We must have safeguards in place to protect taxpayers from financial risks and national security threats. If a project is tanking, or it turns out to have ties to a questionable company, we need the ability to claw back those funds and redirect them to better uses.”

Ford’s decision was followed by GM’s announcement in December it’s backing out of a joint venture with South Korea-based LG Energy Solution for a $2.5 billion Ultium Cells battery plant near Lansing that came with a $120 million SOAR grant.

MEDC officials ultimately cut Ford’s taxpayer cash from about $1.75 billion to between $384 and $409 million, depending on the number of jobs created, according to Bridge Michigan.

MEDC paid out GM’s SOAR grant in 2023, well before any jobs were created, and last week voted not to claw back the funding, opting instead to transfer the obligation to create 1,360 jobs to LG.

Other SOAR deals are also poised to flop, with CCP-linked Gotion, Inc. CEO Chuck Thelen announcing on Friday he halted the state permitting process to build the Gotion EV battery component plant in Mecosta County amid litigation over its fate.

Like GM and Ford, Gotion landed $715 million in taxpayer incentives from the SOAR program through secretly negotiated agreements with Whitmer’s MEDC and select lawmakers in 2022, before widespread opposition over the company’s ties to communist China derailed its plans.

The struggles at MEDC are nothing new.

A broader analysis of corporate incentive deals in Michigan from 2000 to 2020 found that out of a total of 123,060 new jobs promised, a mere 10,889 actually materialized, a success rate of just 9%.

“Only one in 11 of the announced jobs in these front page stories ever came to fruition,” according to Front Page Failures, released by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in December 2024.

Another analysis of the first $1 billion in SOAR grant money spent found similar results, with Bridge Michigan identifying the creation of a total of 200 out of 12,000 promised jobs as of mid-June 2024.

MEDC officials argue the SOAR program hasn’t yet matured enough to effectively analyze whether it’s meeting its goal of attracting and retaining jobs in Michigan, but Boyer and his oversight committee aren’t buying it.

“The private sector measures their earnings matrix on a quarterly basis and you’re telling me the government can’t measure its matrix years down the road?” DeBoyer said. “That is messaging to conceal failures.”