In early January, the Trump administration quietly canceled $450 million in funding for grid resilience programs in Puerto Rico. It’s the final dismantling of the Biden-era’s distributed energy strategy for the island, and came via a sweeping termination of the core cooperative agreements that formed the backbone of the $1 billion Puerto Rico Energy Resilience Fund.
Trump appointees at the Department of Energy canceled $365 million of that funding last spring, terminating awards distributed through the Programa de Comunidades Resilientes, which was building solar and storage systems at hospitals and community housing facilities. The residential solar and storage funding, known as the Programa Acceso Solar, was slated for vulnerable residents around the island. As of early 2026, more than 5,000 installations had already been completed, though the program was designed to deploy at more than 30,000 rural, low-income, and medically vulnerable homes.
According to internal documents viewed by Latitude Media, all eight awards under that program were canceled on January 9, effectively bringing an end to the Resilience Fund.
A letter that DOE sent to members of Congress indicated that up to $350 million of the unused funding will be reallocated to “practical fixes to improve generation” on the island.
“The former administration pursued a 100% renewable future, which led to intermittent generation deployment policies that have raised energy costs for Puerto Rican families and businesses, threatened the reliability of their energy system, and undermined national security,” the letter said.
Notably, the now-rescinded funds for distributed energy deployments in Puerto Rico weren’t allocated in either of the two key infrastructure laws passed in the Biden era. Instead, they were a part of an appropriations bill passed in the wake of 2022’s Hurricane Fiona, which caused a system-wide outage that left much of Puerto Rico’s grid offline for weeks, in the final weeks before the House flipped to Republican control.
A long road
When the second Trump administration took office last year, a substantial portion of the federal funds allocated for the island’s grid resilience and modernization remained unspent, and it wasn’t immediately clear what would happen to that work.
That said, there was hope that the resilience funding for Puerto Rico, and the programs set up by DOE’s Grid Deployment Office to disburse it, would remain intact. Puerto Rico’s governor, Trump ally Jenniffer González-Colón, was a vocal supporter of the creation of the billion-dollar Resilience Fund, and won the governor’s race on a platform to modernize and stabilize the island’s fragile power grid. She was sworn into office in January 2025, and met with Energy Secretary Chris Wright in February.
And as late as March, grantees who had been formally selected to build backup power for hospitals via the Programa Comunidades Resilientes were receiving emails from DOE, informing them of the process for finalizing terms and conditions of the awards. (Awards issued under that track of funding hadn’t been finalized before the Biden administration left office.)
As one person directly involved with the program, who wished to remain anonymous, put it to Latitude at the time: “At that point we thought the program was going to be safe, at least probably the hospital part — who could argue against backup power for hospitals, right?”
But then things fell apart. Meetings to finalize resilient communities awards were never scheduled. And in March, when the Department of Government Efficiency swept through DOE encouraging deferred resignations, around half of the GDO career staff, tasked with managing the appropriated grid resilience funding, departed; that group included senior leadership. (GDO was eventually cut altogether amid the agency’s official restructuring last fall.)
The remaining staff working on the Puerto Rico grid awards were shunted aside, replaced by an informal “Puerto Rico taskforce” led by a Trump appointee known for her efforts to suppress transmission research that highlighted the high cost of coal.
And then the final blow: According to reporting by El Nuevo Día, Governor González-Colón pulled her support for the funding last May, agreeing instead with the Trump administration’s plan to redirect the money to transmission and distribution projects. The Programa Comunidades Resilientes was officially canceled later that month — the first blow in an effort that has now culminated with the redirection of the entire fund that the governor once backed so fervently.
