Speaking in front of a roomful of journalists at CERAWeek in Houston this week, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright vowed to honor deals his agency made through the Loan Programs Office and “very selectively use” the in-house lender “to nudge things that ultimately can deliver more affordable, reliable, secure energy.”
“We inherit a loan book and follow the rule of law,” Wright told the audience.
Yet, in an apparent violation of federal law, the Department of Energy has scrubbed the instructions and guidelines for how to apply for loans from its website, Heatmap has learned.
A link on a page outlining the application process now directs back to the agency’s homepage.
“They didn’t just close the front door, they removed it from the building,” a former LPO contractor, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, told Heatmap.
The federal statute governing the LPO lays out specific rules for making applications available online. The LPO’s website “must include, at a minimum” the “method and further instructions for submission” of an application and “the programmatic, technical, financial, and other factors and criteria that DOE will use to evaluate” the request.
Until January, that information was easily accessible on the site. Snapshots from the Internet Archive show the link with instructions on the process was still live as of January 21, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. By the end of that month, however, the page was no longer available.
A source with direct knowledge of the deletion said the page came down amid Trump officials’ hasty purge of references to Biden-era policies directing infrastructure funding to economically disadvantaged, polluted neighborhoods. The page in question referenced programs such as the Justice40 initiative, a policy to direct 40% of federal benefits to such neighborhoods, and community benefits plans, a requirement in the Inflation Reduction Act to develop strategies to benefit local residents and workers in places where federal dollars funded projects, and was swept up in the mass removal.
A spokesperson for the Energy Department said companies can receive a link to the application upon request and pointed to a link for pre-application consulting that remains live on the site.
Locking away vital public information is just one sign of how the once-bustling LPO has ground to a halt in the past two months.
The lender, which has nearly $400 billion of loan authority, formed the spear tip of the Biden administration’s approach to deploying money from the nation’s landmark climate spending laws. Over the past four years, the LPO invested over $100 billion through dozens of deals to modernize and expand the United States’ aging electrical grids, bring solar panel manufacturing back home, and finance the reopening of a shuttered nuclear power station for the first time in American history.
In a cease-and-desist letter sent in early December, House Republicans accused the LPO’s then-director Jigar Shah of “scrambling to close deals” as part of a “rush-to-green agenda” voters rejected when they re-elected Trump. Two weeks later, the Energy Department’s Trump-appointed inspector general issued a report urging the LPO to halt “all loan and loan guarantee packages.”
The job cuts undertaken by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed the LPO’s headcount by at least 10%, according to another former employee who was part of the office’s unionized workforce.
“These deals are complicated, and people were already in overdrive,” the former employee said. “I really do not see how LPO can manage these projects with a reduction in headcount.”
In mid-February, the Trump administration approved its first disbursement of funding through the LPO to a sustainable aviation fuel producer — but only after facing pressure from Montana Senator Steve Daines, a Republican in whose state the jet-fuel refinery is set to be built.
Other companies that were promised financing from the LPO aren’t waiting. In October, LPO granted Aspen Aerogels a conditional loan of $670 million to fund a factory in Statesboro, Georgia, to make thermal barriers for electric vehicle batteries. General Motors was expected to be an early offtaker.
But last month, the Massachusetts-based manufacturer told investors it had backed out of the loan process and decided instead to focus on its existing assembly line in Rhode Island — and increase production in China and Mexico.
The BRICS brothers. Suo Takekuma - Pool/Getty Images
