The Department of Energy has sent Congress a list of nearly 2,000 awards the agency plans to “retain or modify” from the Biden era, Latitude Media has learned. The list comes as Energy Secretary Chris Wright heads to Capitol Hill this afternoon for the DOE budget hearing before the House appropriations committee.
A small number of awards — less than 10% of the list — appear to have previously received official termination notices from DOE. Those 18 projects appeared in October on the department’s official cancellation list of around 320 awards , which primarily targeted companies based in Democrat-led states. Most stemmed from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding, though a handful were funded by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Apparently reinstated awards include 13 previously-cancelled projects under the Grid Resilience and Innovation Program, which DOE recently rebranded as the SPARK program, and reopened for another round of funding.
Most projects on the list sent to Congress today had not received any termination notice from DOE, nor had they appeared on any of the lists of “threatened” projects that circulated last year. Some projects on the list have already been completed and are in the midst of closing out their awards.
More notable is what’s not on the list. The vast majority of the projects that lost their funding last year have not been reinstated. Most are still in limbo, waiting for DOE to process and respond to their informal disputes.
Several of DOE’s largest projects awarded to Democrat-led states remain terminated, including the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub and the Arches Hydrogen Hub in California. The five remaining Hubs, located in Delaware, Ohio, North Dakota, Maryland, and the Gulf Coast, are tagged for retention or modification. Both the Delaware and Maryland Hubs had been recommended for termination last spring, alongside the Pacific Northwest and California Hubs.
Uncertainty continues
There’s still a lot of uncertainty about this new list. For example, it’s not clear which projects are being “modified,” and what those modifications might entail. Meanwhile, though DOE reinstated several projects after losing a federal lawsuit led by the City of St. Paul, most of those are not on the list sent to Congress. (Those seven projects did receive official notices of reinstatement this spring.)
The list itself comes after 15 months of delay and disruption for most DOE grantees, which has created deep uncertainty among private sector and academic partners alike around the federal government’s future role in U.S. energy innovation.
It’s also unclear whether the stalled or canceled projects on this new list will be able to move forward as planned. Widespread layoffs and departures of career staff across the agency have left questions about whether offices have the bandwidth to manage remaining projects. The year-long pause on funding has already had serious ramifications for many projects, with some awardees choosing to abandon their grants altogether, make layoffs, and, in the case of green cement maker Sublime Systems, even file for bankruptcy.
The cancellations themselves are part of a broader pattern of slowed and abandoned energy innovation funding at DOE, according to an analysis by the agency’s Alumni Network. That includes a significant drop in the number of new funding opportunities made available to applicants in the last year — the administration opened just eight in 2025 compared to the prior average of 50 — as well as in new obligations. The agency also appears to have abandoned a number of open funding opportunities, without selecting awardees or identifying applicants that the program was being shuttered.
