Since the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, the Department of Energy has announced the termination of 356 awards, representing $12.5 billion in federal funding. Another 300 awards, totalling $12.2 billion, have been threatened with termination.
But according to a report published today by the DOE Alumni Network, DOE has officially de-obligated funds for just 30 projects — less than 4% of the total federal dollars named on formal and leaked cancellation lists last year. Most of those de-obligated projects stem not from the list of 321 projects DOE canceled in October, but from a tranche of industrial decarbonization projects canceled back in May.
Meanwhile, thousands of projects have been sitting in limbo for more than a year, the report found. DOE has not moved forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to project milestones designed to unlock additional funding, and as a result is effectively freezing them.
Those that received termination letters in October are still waiting, six months later, for DOE to process and respond to their informal disputes. DOE informed awardees who filed a dispute that doing so paused the 120-day time period normally allotted to close out terminated projects. Until the agency makes a determination on those informal disputes, projects can’t move forward with the formal appeals process.
To date, very few awardees have received any response from DOE on their dispute letters, and not all projects can afford to wait for the process to be resolved. In mid-March, for example, green cement maker Sublime Systems laid off two-thirds of its workforce after waiting months for an update on its $87 million grant to scale its manufacturing. Sublime said it is still awaiting resolution of its informal dispute.
Meanwhile, projects that found themselves on the second, leaked list of alleged cancellations, but have yet to be formally cancelled, are largely being ghosted by the agency. More than half of the awards on the second list have received no payments since October, despite never receiving a formal termination notice. Still more projects are frozen at funding disbursement points, and conditional awards have not been finalized.
The Alumni Network, a nonpartisan group of former DOE employees facilitating policy engagement in support of the agency’s mission, has been working to connect awardees with resources, and also tracking and documenting the broader patterns emerging over the last year.
“We’re writing this report now because…we have enough trend data to understand that DOE is not working quickly to resolve the disputes that arose from last year’s terminations,” one former official explained, adding that the report represents a “historical perspective” on the first year of the second Trump administration.
“It’s important to write it all down because that resource doesn’t exist,” they added, “and for companies that are involved, for members of Congress who are working to try and get some of these projects reinstated, for the states who are relying on these awards…it’s important to understand the full context.”
Ghosted by DOE
According to the report, thousands of other DOE projects that don’t appear on either of last fall’s cancellation lists, but were slated to receive payments in 2026, are also getting radio silence from the agency. Those projects are among those that are functionally frozen, former DOE officials explained, because DOE isn’t allowing them to move through approval checkpoints that unlock funding and allow projects to move into the next stage of development.
In the past, DOE tried to make these processes smooth and timely, so as not to disrupt projects while also ensuring they were meeting technical milestones and clearing required environmental reviews, the former officials said. Now, DOE is simply not making any decision at all. While the report didn’t list specifics, the number of projects sitting in limbo is high enough that it could result in the effective cancellation of much of DOE’s existing investments.
Meanwhile, several conditional awards that were made in the waning days of the Biden administration are also being ghosted, including projects that secured $850 million under the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, and $371 million from the Transmission Siting and Economic Development Program. More than 60 projects had been selected for awards under those two programs, pending a short negotiation process with DOE in which project budget and milestones would be set. For those conditional awards and others, however, DOE has “gone dark,” and refused to either rescind the awards, or finalize them.
This widespread administrative freeze is impacting projects in states led by both Democrats and Republicans. A $57 million award to Duke Energy and the state of North Carolina to reconstruct a 230-kilovolt transmission line, for example, hasn’t been officially terminated, but also hasn’t received any funding disbursements, according to public spending data. That project, awarded under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program (recently rebranded as the SPARK program) was aimed at meeting growing electricity demand in North Carolina and improving grid reliability.
Even South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, a strong ally of President Trump, has been unable to unfreeze funding for a Mercedes-Benz factory in her home state. Over the summer, Mace reportedly asked the administration repeatedly to release the funds. The factory, which was slated to receive $285 million to facilitate production of an all-electric van, would have brought 800 jobs to Mace’s district. As of early 2026, however, nothing at all has been distributed.
Moving forward in Trump 2.0
For most awardees, regardless of project status, next steps on their partnership with the federal government remain unclear, former DOE officials affiliated with the Alumni Network told Latitude Media on background. Many are taking a multi-prong approach, including appealing to their state representatives, informing local media, and spreading awareness about both their project’s job creation potential and its alignment with Trump administration talking points like “energy dominance” and “beautiful, clean coal.”
Congress, for its part, nodded to the administrative freeze in the FY 2026 Appropriations agreement, signed into law in January. That bill requires DOE to notify both the House and Senate appropriations committees in advance if it plans to terminate awards greater than $1 million, an indication of bipartisan concern regarding the fate of DOE-funded projects.
To date, the most direct path to funding disbursements, at least for terminated projects, has been through the federal court systems. In January, a judge in Washington, D.C. ordered DOE to reinstate nearly $28 million in canceled grants after finding that the Trump administration violated the equal protection clause when it targeted funding recipients based on their location in Democrat-led states. The seven awards covered by that order were officially reinstated, and are now among the few projects receiving funding disbursements from the agency.
Earlier this week another five canceled projects located across Colorado, Connecticut, and New York followed that blueprint as well, filing a similar lawsuit in Washington. D.C. The awardees, all of whom had been funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, are asking the court to order DOE to restore the awards.
But even those legal wins are still the exception. For most projects, there’s no clear sense of what, if anything, will get their funding moving again. That uncertainty, DOE Alumni Network executive director Jocelyn Brown-Saracino said, risks “undermining the willingness of these partners to work with the DOE in the future.”
The stalemate at DOE, she added, “undermines the reliability of federal grants as a mechanism for achieving national energy goals.”
