When the Biden administration left office in January, federal agencies had obligated nearly $97 billion in funding to clean energy projects — around 84% of the dollars the Inflation Reduction Act had allocated for such projects in 2022. The Department of Energy, which was at the center of these efforts, had committed $108 billion in loans across 53 clean energy projects.
But the ramp up to disbursing those funds was slow. Many projects finalized awards in the final, frenzied days before the inauguration, meaning money was still months or years from actually being spent, and just a handful of funded projects had broken ground. At least one office estimated that 75% of its projects wouldn’t enter construction until 2029 or later — long after a hypothetical second Biden term would have ended.
According to a report out today based on exit interviews with more than 80 former DOE staffers, the barriers that caused the slowdown were largely of the government’s own making: “Historic legislative ambition was undercut by an executive branch machinery that defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies.”
The report’s authors — former staffers at the Loan Programs Office, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, and Office of Technology Commercialization — outline key areas of preparation to ensure the next pro-clean energy administration can hit the ground running; these include streamlining contracting processes, updating compliance laws, and building a roster of pre-vetted personnel.
It’s a tactic the Trump administration has used to great effect with Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023 which outlines a detailed roadmap for reshaping the federal government. That document’s chapter on DOE recommends repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, redirecting funding that can’t be repealed toward fossil fuels, shutting down several offices, and eliminating any diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — all of which the administration has now done.
Putting that approach to work for a clean energy agenda is part of the motivation behind the recent report on what worked and what didn’t at the Biden DOE.
“We want to be in constant build mode,” explained report co-author Alan Propp, who worked at the Loan Programs Office. “If there’s anything that we learned from the past four years, it’s that time passes really quickly. There are things you learn a year in, and that’s a year you can’t get back.”
Organizations interested in the re-industrial strategy that the IRA started need to be thinking now about building “discrete pieces” of that strategy that can be ready to go on day one, he added.
What went wrong
The report, funded by Renaissance Philanthropy and The Navigation Fund, draws primarily from DOE’s infrastructure offices. In addition to a “persistent bias against perceived risk-taking,” challenges included slow hiring processes, complex award cycles, and a lack of sector-specific deployment targets. Programs were trying to meet too many goals at once, former staff said, pointing to labor, equity, and security goals in addition to decarbonization, which caused tradeoffs.
And delays added up: Processing financial assistance awards took an average of 30 to 40 months. Funding Opportunity Announcements ran between 120 and 250 pages. Hiring staff often took six months or more. The report also points to the National Environmental Policy Act and the Davis-Bacon Act, among others, as causing significant hold-ups. Though well-intentioned, the laws were “nearly impossible to efficiently implement,” with requirements that were “outdated, overly prescriptive, or simply misaligned with modern industry practice.”
It didn’t have to go this way. In the past, the government has been able to move quickly on energy projects. Under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority began building the Norris Dam just four months after the TVA Act was passed. And under Barack Obama’s 2009 Recovery Act, around 7% of DOE funding had been disbursed within a year — compared to 5% of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds disbursed after three years.
Slow implementation left projects vulnerable when the second Trump administration came into office. Since January, the administration has moved rapidly to dismantle Biden-era clean energy programs, rescinding unobligated IRA funds and canceling hundreds of awards.
Building a blueprint
There were also some major successes at DOE during the Biden era. The report points to DOE’s Transmission Facilitation Program, a $2.5 billion initiative created under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Under that program DOE acted as an “anchor customer” for projects via capacity contracts, creating much-needed demand. After projects were built, DOE could sell that capacity to generators wanting to use the line.
Meanwhile, the Loan Programs Office’s 2024 process redesign cut the average time applicants spent in due diligence from around 310 days to around 160 days. Elsewhere at the agency, Partnership Intermediary Agreements and prize competitions helped speed up award processes by simplifying applications and using milestone-based funding.
These efficiencies don’t necessarily require passing new legislation, said Ramsey Fahs, who worked at LPO and OCED — though they do require getting started early. “The whole conclusion of our report is that there’s a ton that can be done with the existing set of authorities…a lot of flexibility is baked in but not used,” he explained. “But to use it, because the government is so complicated, you actually have to know a lot about [that flexibility] beforehand.”
For example, federal grant regulations known as 2CFR 200, are often “not well attuned to commercial deployment realities,” the report notes. Negotiation timelines between the Biden DOE and the private sector were largely dependent on navigating those regulations. But there wasn’t a lot of preparatory work on best practices for contracting with the private sector in advance. The report suggests that DOE should default to an alternative contracting mechanism known as Other Transaction Authority.
Before OTA can be put to work, though, stakeholders need to develop contract terms acceptable to the government and private sector. Developing templates and a playbook “can ensure program staff aren’t reinventing terms deal-by-deal.”
Taking this Project 2025-like approach to building a clean energy agenda also means identifying priority projects in advance, including in areas like nuclear, transmission, and critical minerals, and designing the strategies to put those projects in motion on day one.
“It’s not enough to say we should take a “whole-of-government” approach to an issue like clean energy,” the report notes. “We need a detailed plan for how to use the $5 billion/year in electricity purchases and the PMA’s 45,000 miles of transmission lines — all under the direct control of the federal government — to achieve explicit policy outcomes.” It’s also not enough to state an intent to rebuild the federal workforce, it added: “We need a roster of hundreds of people that can be brought on and trained rapidly to implement within weeks.”
Repurposing Trump tactics for clean energy
The report isn’t arguing for an exact replica of the Trump DOE approach, the co-authors told Latitude Media. But some of the current administration’s strategies could be leveraged for clean energy deployment by a future administration.
“Folks we’ve talked to have been very impressed with the creativity and ability to use a lot of different tools that the current administration has shown,” explained Fahs. “They’re not super excited about the ends that those tools have been applied to, and in some cases think that the individual applications have been shoddily done,” he added, pointing in particular to the multi-billion dollar deal the government signed with MP Materials.
“There are lots of critics of that deal and how it’s structured, but people have been struck by the fact that [the Trump administration] was able to bundle all of these different things — price floors, equity position, loans, contracts for difference — into one deal,” he explained.
In the past, DOE has largely stuck to grants and debt, despite “tentative attempts” to use other tools. Now the question advocates in the space are asking is, “can we take that creativity into a more pro-clean energy direction?”
