Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged Thursday making the final decision to allow a struggling solar company to continue receiving taxpayer money after it had technically defaulted on a $535 million federal loan guaranteed by his agency.

Chu spokesman Damien La­Vera said in a statement that the secretary approved the restructuring agreement for Solyndra because it gave the company “the best possible chance to succeed in a very competitive marketplace and put the company in a better position to repay the loan.”

Also Thursday, a law enforcement official confirmed that the criminal probe of Solyndra is focused on whether the company and its officers misrepresented the firm’s finances to the government in seeking the loan or engaged in accounting fraud. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe.

Reporter Matthew Boyle discusses how Senate Indian Affairs Committee Democratic staffers are billing taxpayers for their trip to Maui for a field hearing.

In his weekly address on Saturday, President Barack Obama called for Congress to approve more money for a new—and vaguely defined—program to repair roads, bridges and airports as a means of creating jobs for construction workers.

The program, Obama said, would create jobs for workers who used to build houses by “by giving loans to companies that want to repair our roads and bridges and airports.”

The president did not explain how loaning money to a company that wants to help repair a road, bridge or airport would cause more roads, bridges or airports to be repaired and thus necessitate the hiring of more construction workers to repair them.

Congressional Democrats mandated creation of the program, dubbed the Emergency Homeowners' Loan Program, as part of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill enacted last summer. It aims to help about 30,000 unemployed homeowners continue making their mortgage payments by providing zero-interest loans of up to $50,000, which can be forgiven over five years.

The indictment of 39 defendants in an international money laundering case sends a message to potential terrorists and drug dealers that their financial pipelines are being monitored, a federal prosecutor said yesterday.

La Raza has money to burn. In an NPR interview, outgoing La Raza CEO and chief financial officer Yzaguirre told correspondent Tony Cox that, during his thirty-year tenure, the organization’s budget had grown from $500,000 to $40 million—or an incredib

"The way I see it is, I'm doing all the work of providing the labor, the wages, the electricity, the lighting, the maintenance of the pumps, the repairs and the insurance, which is quite substantial," Curro said. "I'm doing all the work, and somebody else