The last 18 months have been a whirlwind at the Department of Energy. The agency went from freezing billions of dollars in federal energy grants and canceling hundreds of awards, to reinstating many of them due to a court order, posting billions of dollars in new funding opportunities, and sending Congress a list of nearly 2,000 awards it plans to retain, including several large-scale industrial projects.
But for a broad category of smaller awards focused on local energy resilience, school retrofits, and energy efficiency — awards that never appeared on DOE’s project cancellation lists — things are still in limbo.
The Office of State and Community Energy Programs was established in 2022 to distribute roughly $16 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to recipients like state, local, and Tribal governments as well as school districts. Programs housed within the office provided funding for projects designed to cut energy bills, repair schools, and bolster resilience in underserved communities around the country. Compared to the rest of DOE’s programs, these were unique, former staffers explained: These weren’t research and development projects or large-scale deployments, but for a time they had real momentum because of the immediate impacts for communities.
While a small portion of SCEP funding was available via competitive grants, most of the office’s funds were formula dollars, statutory allocations automatically distributed to communities based on specific population or economic criteria, rather than via the more common merit review process. In other words, Congress and not DOE determined which recipients got what funding. During the Biden administration, SCEP was its own office. But it was absorbed into the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation when DOE restructured last year.
When the second Trump administration took office in January 2025, many of SCEPs programs, including formula funding and competitive grants, had already obligated the majority of their dollars. As of mid-2026, however, the majority of those dollars have not been spent, according to an analysis by the DOE Alumni Network. Those include funds intended to do everything from upgrading HVAC systems and fixing leaky roofs at rural schools to long-promised efficiency and resilience projects in tribal communities.
Getting SCEP programs back up and running may be tricky after the ricochet of the last 18 months. As one former SCEP staffer told Latitude Media, “We went to these communities with something really exciting, and now we haven’t been able to follow through on that promise.”
The impacts are particularly stark for Tribal communities and others that already have a “fraught relationship” with the federal government, they added. “I don’t know if people will ever engage with us the same way again if we try to do something like this in the future.”
Programs in limbo
Despite ongoing chaos at the agency throughout 2025, DOE disbursed $400 million worth of SCEP formula funding last July, via two programs aimed at helping families make energy efficiency upgrades to help lower their utility bills. At the time, DOE rescinded Biden-era environmental review requirements, which the agency said slowed down how quickly it could deliver certain funds to low-income households.
But other SCEP programs have seen very little movement: Renew America’s Schools, a $500 million competitive award program designed to help public schools make investments in their energy infrastructure to decrease costs and improve indoor air quality, has been largely on ice.
The program was structured in three rounds of funding issued over five fiscal years. The first recipients were announced in June 2023. Of that first round, only 21% of funds have actually been spent so far, with several schools already having passed their planned project completion dates without receiving any funds. Of the second round of recipients,announced in August 2024, only around half of those projects had finalized their awards by the presidential elections in November.
Last summer, second-round awardees sent a letter to DOE making an “urgent plea” to allow the process to move forward. A response from the agency reviewed by Latitude Media told awardees last fall that DOE is still reviewing all programs and grants “to ensure alignment with the statutory mission” of DOE and with the priorities of the Trump administration. To date, almost none of the second round awardees, including those who had their funds obligated before President Trump took office, have moved forward.
Applications for the third and final round opened in December 2024, in the final weeks of the Biden administration, but were taken down shortly after the Trump administration came into office in early 2025. The application portal hasn’t been reopened.
Renew Schools funding is issued as reimbursements, and while traditional merit-based DOE grants require a 50% match from recipients, SCEP had just a 5% match, an effort to lower barriers for school districts. That lower match is what enabled most participating districts to take part at all, according to former DOE staff. The freeze in federal funding, one recipient explained, means that districts either have to delay projects, or raise the funds via local taxpayers.
Many SCEP formula funding programs — non-competitive funding opportunities for which entities submit applications for DOE approval — have also stopped committing funds. That includes the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program, which had $550 million in infrastructure law funding for states, local governments, territories, and Tribes to carry out community‑scale efficiency projects.
That program, which hasn’t committed any new money since before 2025, offers small amounts of funding for everything from energy efficiency retrofits and energy workforce development to energy auditing and planning. In the case of EECBG, applications approved before 2025 are moving forward. But nearly five years after that money was appropriated, the vast majority of eligible local governments have not received funds.
One SCEP funding recipient whose award wasn’t finalized at the end of the Biden administration told Latitude that their state representatives in Washington have been receptive to their concerns. But considering the relatively small dollar amounts of these awards compared to others within DOE, they don’t seem to be high on the agency’s list when it comes to reconsidering Biden-era grants.
