Almost exactly a month after reporting that Energy Secretary Chris Wright was looking to reshuffle leadership at the Loan Programs Office, acting director Lane Genatowski is on his way out.
Genatowski, who stepped into the role at the end of March, departed LPO yesterday for a senior advisor role in the Department of Energy’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Latitude Media has confirmed.
A DOE spokesperson, who confirmed Genatowski’s departure, didn’t comment on who would replace him as director of LPO. But his departure comes in the wake of reporting by Latitude Media and others that Secretary Wright has been pushing to replace Genatowski with bitcoin mining executive Greg Beard, who joined the office as a senior advisor in April. Beard currently remains in that role, the spokesperson confirmed.
Sources told Latitude Media in May that a debate over LPO’s leadership had been ongoing for several weeks. Some inside the office have supported Genatowski, who served as the director of the Advanced Research Programs Agency for Energy under the first Trump administration, while others, including Wright, have wanted him out.
Beard, for his part, is new to the federal government, having joined the administration from a bitcoin mining company he founded called Stronghold Mining. The company owns and operates power plants, primarily those using waste coal, and profits both by selling energy into wholesale power markets, and by operating bitcoin mining operations on-site.
In February, Stronghold was acquired by rival Bitcoin miner Bitfarms in an all-stock transaction, two months before Beard arrived at DOE.
Mixed signals
The fate of LPO has been a major question mark as the second Trump administration has ramped up in its first six months. The conservative policy blueprint Project 2025 calls for eliminating the office entirely, and the first Trump administration sought to zero out the office’s budget four years in a row. And the House’s version of a budget bill makes significant cuts to the office’s funding, rescinding all unobligated funds under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last month, when DOE said it was reviewing Biden-era commitments made by the agency, LPO projects were first on the chopping block. According to former officials who spoke with Latitude Media, the administration planned to announce its decision to de-obligate seven loans that hadn’t yet reached final close, totaling more than $8 billion.
(Most of the projects on that list, Latitude reported, had already decided to step away from the funding of their own volition.)
LPO’s partial loan guarantee to Sunnova Energy, which filed for bankruptcy in recent weeks, has drawn particular attention. That deal, signed in late 2023, provided a guarantee for investors who were financing rooftop solar loans, expanding loan access to households that might not otherwise have qualified for credit. The structure of that agreement means that even in light of the bankruptcy, the solar loans themselves are protected.
At the same time, at an industry event last week, Secretary Wright called the LPO “an efficient tool for low-cost debt” for boosting transmission, nuclear, and critical mineral projects.
Despite that apparent support from the top of the agency, LPO has lost massive numbers of staffers in the last several months — at least half of the office’s workforce departed in the slew of changes made by the Department of Government Efficiency.
That’s a significant problem for the eventual new head of the office, experts have told Latitude Media, thanks to the technical expertise required to manage its portfolio of projects ranging from transmission and methane emissions monitoring to nuclear power and battery production. As former LPO head Jigar Shah put it in a recent episode of Open Circuit, “one of the challenges you have here is that you have a bunch of people who don’t really understand…what they want to do with the Loan Programs Office.”
