Energy Secretary Chris Wright may be set to appoint the Trump administration’s third Loan Programs Office director in four months.
Latitude Media has learned that Wright is looking to fire Lane Genatowski, who has led the office for roughly six weeks after stepping in at the end of March. Genatowski replaced John Sneed, who served as LPO director for two years during the first Trump administration, and who reportedly agreed to return in a transitional capacity in January. Now, Wright wants Greg Beard, a bitcoin mining executive who joined LPO as a “senior advisor” in April, to step into the role.
Exactly when — and if — Beard will officially take over, however, remains unclear. The office has yet to make any official announcement. But according to several sources who spoke with Latitude Media on the condition of anonymity, a debate over LPO’s leadership has been roiling DOE decision makers for several weeks, since at least late April.
In response to Latitude’s request for comment, DOE’s public affairs office said Genatowski is only serving as “acting director,” but that there are “no immediate staffing changes anticipated at this time.” Genatowski and Beard hold the same official title of senior advisor for the office, the spokesperson said.
(Genatowski’s official bio on the DOE website states that he was “appointed by the President in March 2025 to serve as Director of the Loan Programs Office.”)
The potential leadership change would only make it more challenging for the office to execute on its mission, said former director Jigar Shah, who led the office during the Biden administration.
“One of the challenges you have here is that you have a bunch of people who don’t really understand, I think, what they want to do with the Loan Programs Office,” Shah explained on a recent episode of Open Circuit. And that causes problems for the career staff, who continue to be “very proud of their work and want to process those loans,” Shah said — as well as for applicants seeking funding.
“You don’t know whether you’re in or whether you’re out…and it feels like that changes on a day-to-day basis,” he added.
Meet Greg Beard
While Genatowski came to LPO from the Advanced Research Programs Agency for Energy, which he led during the first Trump administration, Beard is new to the federal government.
In his most recent role, Beard founded and led a “vertically integrated” Bitcoin mining company called Stronghold Mining. The company’s business model involves purchasing power plants, with a focus of those capable of utilizing waste coal, a byproduct of mining and processing operations; it installs Bitcoin mining operations on-site. Profits come both from mining crypto, and by selling energy into wholesale markets.
Stronghold went public via IPO in 2021. In January 2025, the company agreed to pay around $1.4 million to settle claims that it had violated PJM market rules during the one-year period between June 2021 and May 2022. One of Stronghold’s power plants in Pennsylvania — which was registered as a capacity resource in PJM, meaning it had to be available if needed — failed to offer its electricity to the market and instead used it for Bitcoin mining. That occurred around two-thirds of the time throughout the year, FERC said. Stronghold also bought power from PJM at wholesale rates, some of which was categorized as “station power” to run the plant, but was actually used to mine Bitcoin.
In the midst of those proceedings, last April, Stronghold signed a “distributed energy resource and peak saver” agreement with demand response company Voltus, to help Stronghold register for programs in PJM. Voltus, for its part, recently forked over $18 million to settle claims it violated demand response rules in MISO.
In February, Stronghold was acquired by rival Bitcoin miner Bitfarms in an all-stock transaction, two months before Beard arrived at DOE.
Prior to his foray into the world of crypto, Beard spent nearly a decade at Apollo Global Management, including serving as the firm’s global head of natural resources. In that role, according to his LinkedIn profile, Beard oversaw investment in energy, metals, mining, and agriculture.
His potential appointment comes after several weeks of upheaval at LPO, in which the office lost around half of its federal workforce — about a hundred staffers — to the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program. As one employee told Latitude Media this week, the immense exodus of technical expertise will limit LPO’s ability to both close deals and monitor projects.
LPO’s new shape
LPO was established in 2005, as part of a law passed by a Republican Congress, and signed by President George W. Bush. Its remit was to issue low-cost revolving loans to projects that “employ new or significantly improved technologies as compared to commercial technologies in service in the United States at the time.” The law points to categories like renewable energy, advanced fossil energy technology, hydrogen, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear, among other technologies.
In 2010 LPO gave Tesla a $465 million loan, to help the company build its manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. But it wasn’t until much more recently that the office’s work really started to pick up steam. LPO gained significantly more authority thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022. By the end of the Biden administration, the office had announced 53 deals totaling more than a billion dollars in committed project investments, and had a pipeline of applicants seeking more than $200 billion in loans.
In the early weeks of the second Trump administration, the fate of the office — and of its projects — remained a major question mark. Trump wasn’t enthusiastic about LPO in his first term, and repeatedly attempted to zero out its budget. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy blueprint, calls for LPO to be eliminated entirely.
The uncertainty over LPO’s funding is already having an impact in the wider energy world: Aspen Aerogels, which had a conditional commitment for a $670 million LPO loan to build a factory in Georgia, told investors in February that it had withdrawn from the negotiation process for the loan, and would instead focus on expanding capacity in China and Mexico.
And Pacific Gas and Electric warned California regulators that ratepayers will ultimately have to help offset Trump policies, including the “substantial uncertainty” around whether and when the utility will get the $15 billion loan it finalized with the Biden administration.
But Trump’s LPO hasn’t entirely been on ice. At least two projects have been receiving disbursements of their loans. In early February, Montana Senator Steve Daines (R) said he had stepped in to pressure DOE in support of Montana Renewables, a subsidiary of petroleum-based fuel manufacturer Calumet. At Daines’ urging, LPO unfroze a $1.44 billion loan to help Montana Renewables expand domestic production of sustainable aviation fuel. The office has also disbursed payments from a $1.5 billion loan to help restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station.
