The Department of Energy’s loan office, which once was responsible for deploying $400 billion, is now fighting for its future on multiple fronts.
Cuts induced by the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and shifting political winds have reshaped the office’s authority. But it’s the challenges inside the Loan Programs Office itself — staffing exodus, administrative gridlock, and political infighting — that pose the most existential threats to its ability to execute on its mission: “to be the premier public financing partner that accelerates high-impact energy and manufacturing investments to advance America’s economic future.”
Since the second Trump administration took office in January, LPO has had three directors, been the target of cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency, and weathered accusations of mismanagement by Energy Secretary Chris Wright in multiple testimonies on Capitol Hill.
Earlier this month, the GOP budget bill pared back the office’s potential impact by rescinding much of its credit subsidy, which had been more than quadrupled under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
This is not the money LPO can actually loan out (which gets paid back eventually, with interest), but rather the government’s reserves to cover any loans that aren’t repaid — in other words, the “cost” of the program to taxpayers. (Prior to IRA expansion, loan applicants often had to cover the credit subsidy cost themselves, which acted as a deterrent.) By slashing this backup fund, Congress limited the number of new loans LPO can issue.
In short, Congress did not entirely gut the office. Key statutory lending authorities remain in place, as well as some credit subsidy funding from non-IRA sources. But LPO’s pipeline remains stalled. No new applications have been submitted; no conditional commitments have been finalized; and while previously completed loans have now been receiving their payouts from the office, no new loans have been closed.
According to Jigar Shah, who led the office during the Biden administration, the key question now is whether LPO has the permission structure in place to get loans out the door.
LPO is currently sitting on three “petroleum-adjacent” loans that the office brought to “99% completion” before inauguration in January, Shah told Latitude Media: “All they had to do was just sign and take credit for it, and they still haven’t done those.”
Both Greg Beard, who currently leads the office, and Secretary Wright “largely know what they’re doing…with facilitation from the staff there,” Shah added. “But it is very clear that Greg and Chris Wright do not make any decisions.” Going back and forth to the White House to get Trump’s take on every move, Shah said, is not conducive to getting things done.
Ultimately, Shah said the biggest threat to the future of the office is the signal being sent to applicants and co-investors, including those in sectors the administration wants to support, like critical minerals, nuclear, or geothermal.
Applying for a loan through LPO is a rigorous, time-consuming, and often expensive process. For companies that don’t have their own in-house legal teams, legal fees alone can be a serious barrier. The microgrid developer Indian Energy, for example, received a $72.8 million loan from LPO at the end of the Biden administration, and had seven different law firms vet their project over the course of three years to lock in the funding. Other projects had to hire external consultants to help them through the application and vetting processes.
Now, applicants may be wondering whether that time, and expense, is worth it.
There’s also the question of the message LPO sends to the wider investment community. An LPO loan used to be a stamp of approval that companies could leverage in talks with future investors. The career staff still left at LPO after the DOGE-induced exodus earlier this year are still doing quality work, but the administration itself is giving the impression that it is willing to cut corners for favored projects, Shah said. “I don’t think the office would ever let anyone cut corners,” he said, “but the administration has given off different vibes.”
That inevitable erosion of trust in the government as a reliable financing partner, he added, threatens to inflict far greater damage on the office in the long-term than the cuts imposed by the GOP on July 4.
In testimony to Congress, Secretary Wright has repeatedly suggested LPO rushed loans through without proper due diligence — a claim that could easily fact-checked, given that each application required hundreds of pages of documentation to be submitted to DOE, former LPO official Jen Downing wrote in a letter to Congress this month.
“Just asking an applicant when they submitted their application and accompanying information would disprove it,” wrote Downing. “But with hundreds of millions of dollars owed to them being held up by DOE, private sector borrowers have little to gain and much to lose by making public statements that would contradict the Secretary.”
Internal chaos
During the Biden administration, and especially in the wake of the IRA, LPO staff built up processes and structures that enabled the office to move as quickly as applicants were able to. In 2024, LPO closed 14 loans and loan guarantees, and an additional 15 conditional commitments. By the end of the year the office had a staff of nearly 400 including contractors, and a project pipeline of over 200 companies seeking more than $200 billion in debt financing.
When the second Trump administration took the helm in January, it inherited those 15 conditional commitments, totaling at least $30 billion. These legally-binding agreements reserve funding for specified projects once they meet certain milestones like securing permits or passing necessary environmental reviews.
But in the months since, work has ground to a halt, with none of the 15 conditional commitments moving toward close. (Several of those projects have since decided to walk away from their deals with LPO entirely.)
The stalemate is in part because of the office’s leadership changes. In her letter urging Congress to compel the administration to release funds for conditional commitment, Downing, the former chair of LPO’s Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, said that the office and its staff essentially had to “start from scratch” each time a new director came in. That meant in-depth briefings on every deal that closed since November’s election; questions about rationale for underwriting decisions; and repeated, unfruitful, searches for wrongdoing.
John Sneed, who led the office during the first Trump administration, returned to LPO for two months before departing in mid-March. Sneed was replaced by Lane Genatowski, Trump’s former ARPA-E director. Both men were generally welcomed by LPO staff, who saw them as likely to keep the office moving forward.
Both Greg Beard, who currently leads the office, and Secretary Chris Wright “largely know what they’re doing…with facilitation from the staff there. But it is very clear that Greg and Chris Wright do not make any decisions.”
But within six weeks, rumors were flying that Secretary Wright was pushing to fire Genatowski, and replace him with former bitcoin mining executive Greg Beard, who had joined the office as a senior advisor in April after selling his company to a Canadian firm. The last two months have been chaotic, one source inside the office told Latitude Media.
Though Genatowski had initially been introduced with the title of “director,” when Beard arrived both men were named “senior advisors.” That meant that documents Genatowski had signed as “director” had to be redone, the source said. And though Beard didn’t technically have the director title, he was “running all the meetings.”
The introduction of Beard — whose former company is currently fending off a lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging excessive air and water pollution, various environmental safety violations, and accusations of improperly obtaining energy tax credits — was something of a turning point for the office. While both Sneed and Genatowski told staff they believed LPO should close on existing conditional commitments issued under the Biden administration, Beard appears to feel differently.
In May, LPO’s political leadership “indicated” to staff that the office “would not go forward with [its] commitments as they stand,” wrote Downing (who was a federal employee, not a political appointee). By June, Genatowski was out. For the remaining staff in the office, that was a huge blow.
“Failing to close committed loans when borrowers have met all conditions precedent to close is a breach of contract on the part of the U.S. government,” Downing wrote in her letter to Congress. “If legally binding loan commitments under one administration can be wiped away by the next, what are the implications for public-private partnership in America to build infrastructure projects that require multi-decade partnerships to manage billions of dollars of investment?”
All of that turnover set the office back months, explained one former senior official who worked in the office during the first several months of the Trump administration.
But conditional commitments weren’t the only projects impacted by the decision-making vacuum. Existing applicants in the pipeline, even those that would qualify for funding following the OBBB changes, also can’t move forward, because the office never established the necessary mechanisms to do so post-inauguration.
The OBBB impact
As the former LPO official, who spoke to Latitude Media on background explained, the outcome of the reconciliation process “could have been worse” for LPO. A much more problematic scenario is reflected in the White House budget proposal that was released in May; it asked Congress to rescind all remaining credit subsidy for LPO without replenishment, effectively shuttering key programs.
As of this week, that request is under consideration in Congress. But according to the official, there’s a good chance the office gets a softer treatment on the Hill than by Trump. The House Appropriations Committee draft, released earlier this month, declines to adopt the additional cut requests from the administration and adds support for certain technologies like nuclear. The Senate is expected to release their draft before August recess.
At present, LPO has four distinct programs. Each has its own purpose — and its own pool of money for giving out and for guaranteeing loans. Congress pared back three of them, largely by rescinding the unobligated credit subsidy. (The amount of subsidy required for a given loan depends on its risk profile, as calculated by a federal model maintained by the Office of Management and Budget.)
Here’s where each of those programs currently stands:
The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, designed to help boost domestic manufacturing of advanced vehicles, batteries, and other supply chain components, had as much as $25 billion in available authority. That program, which dates back to 2007, notably funded Tesla in 2010, and more recently backed Ford, General Motors, and Redwood Materials.
ATVM received around $3 billion in credit subsidy under the IRA, which was rescinded by the GOP spending bill. The program’s loan authority wasn’t directly rescinded, and remains at between $17 billion and $25 billion, depending on cycles of repayments and cancellations. Some older appropriated credit subsidy — approximately $2.3 billion — remains, meaning the program can still issue new loans, just with a reduced risk budget.
The Clean Energy Financing program was geared toward supporting innovative clean energy technologies, like advanced fossil fuels or carbon capture and sequestration. The program dates back to 2005, but was expanded by the IRA, which added both additional lending authority and billions in new credit subsidy to support a wider array of projects, including supply chain and grid modernization projects. Reconciliation didn’t touch the program’s $40 billion in loan authority, but rescinded all of the IRA-provided credit subsidy.
The “Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment” program was the flagship new LPO program created by the IRA in 2022. With $250 billion in lending authority, it was by far the largest LPO program, and was intended for projects that repurpose aging energy infrastructure, modernize the grid, or deploy emissions-reducing tech.
Under the Biden administration, that program committed funding for projects including grid modernization efforts by 11 electric and gas utilities, solar plus storage projects in Puerto Rico, and a $1.5 billion loan to restart the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant. The OBBB repealed all of the unobligated credit subsidy (which had been capped at $5 billion, but of which approximately $3.2 billion remained) and renamed the program “Energy Dominance Financing.”
The new Energy Dominance Financing program now has around $202 billion in remaining lending authority, with just $1 billion in credit subsidy — added back in by the OBBB — to back it up.
The Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee program, which has around $20 billion to lend to energy infrastructure and electricity projects in tribal communities, also lost the $75 million in credit subsidy allocated by the IRA. It now has around $11 million in credit subsidy remaining; money allocated pre-IRA. LPO-backed projects through that program include a $72.8 million utility scale solar and long duration energy storage microgrid in California.
Where LPO goes from here
The overarching question that remains unanswered is whether the administration actually intends to use LPO to carry out its energy agenda. Whether they finalize outstanding conditional commitments — which include $23 billion in loans for utility infrastructure projects and $1 billion for advanced fossil company Monolith Materials — will be one key indicator of the administration’s intentions, said Shah. Whether they process any new loans is another.
According to the former LPO official, at present there doesn’t seem to be anyone “willing to pull the trigger to make a decision on something moving forward.” Consolidating authority within LPO itself will be essential to get money moving, he added.
One key barrier, according to Shah, is the credit review board. The group, which reviews pending loan guarantees and votes on whether to advance them to the energy secretary for approval, has not been effectively reformulated under the new administration; without that structure in place, he said, the office can’t approve new loans.
Right now, leadership may still be waiting on a final directive from Congress in the form of the 2026 budget. But based on what the House is already recommending, which includes continued support for the office’s existing programs rather than wiping them out and starting from scratch, the official is hopeful that the GOP does intend to use LPO to execute deals in the next four years; it’s likely, he said, that they would use the program “to target different sectors.”
That said, if the office doesn’t pick up momentum after the FY26 budget is finalized, that will be a significant warning sign, he added: “If they’re still not moving projects by early next year, when they actually have an FY26 budget, that would be a signal that things are just not moving.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated on July 23 to correct the characterization of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee’s funding. That program also faced cuts in the OBBB, which rescinded credit subsidy allocated by the IRA. A previous version of the story indicated Tribal Energy wasn’t targeted by the bill.
