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Except for those related to the FIFA World Cup.
A conversation on FEMA, ICE, and why local disaster response still needs federal support with the National Low-Income Housing Coalition’s Noah Patton.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
A new list of Department of Energy grants slated for termination will hit clean energy and oil majors alike, including Exxon and Chevron.
A new list of grant cancellations obtained by Heatmap includes Climeworks and Heirloom projects funded by 2021 infrastructure law.
Republicans have blamed Democrats for unleashing Russ Vought on federal spending. But it doesn’t take much to see a bigger plan at work.
A list of terminated grants obtained by Heatmap contains a number of grants that will cost jobs and revenue in Republican-led states.
The Trump administration terminated billions in climate and clean energy grants on Wednesday, in what appears to be yet another act of retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown. White House budget director Russell Vought announced on X that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda is being cancelled,” noting that the projects were in 16 states, all but two of which — Vermont and New Hampshire — have Democrats in their governor’s mansion. A Department of Energy release published late last night further clarified that it was terminating 321 awards supporting 223 projects, with a total closer to $7.5 billion.
But a list of the 321 canceled grants that the Department of Energy sent to Congress, obtained by Heatmap, tells a different story. While much of the funding was awarded to blue state-based companies, the intended projects would have benefitted communities elsewhere, including in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana.
The list identifies the grants by their award numbers, and includes information on the DOE office overseeing the grant, the recipient name, and state. The document does not specify the project names, the programs under which they were awarded, or the amounts awarded.
That leaves a lot of open questions about the true impact of the terminations. It’s unclear, for instance, whether the $7.5 billion price tag the Department of Energy assigned to the cancellations is an estimate of the total amount awarded or the unspent remainder still in the agency’s coffers. Five of the listed projects, worth nearly $900 million, were already announced as terminated in an earlier round of cuts back in May.
Many of the projects listed have signed contracts with the government, are already well underway, and have spent at least some of their award. For example, the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships has already published copious educational materials related to its community-driven transportation plan for the Northeast, a project supported by one of the terminated grants.
The list does seem to confirm that blue state grants were the hardest hit, with 79 award cancellations in California, 41 in New York, 34 in Colorado (Secretary of Energy Chris Wright’s home state), 33 in Illinois, and 31 in Massachusetts.
But when I began looking up projects by their award number, I found that many would actually have benefitted Republican strongholds. Take, for example, Moment Energy, a Delaware-based company that was awarded $20 million by the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains to build the first certified manufacturing facility in the United States producing battery energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. The plant was set to be built in Taylor, Texas, creating 50 construction jobs and 200 new permanent positions. After receiving the Energy Department’s stamp of approval, the company raised a $15 million Series A funding round in January to help finance the plant.
Also listed are a $10 million grant for Carbon Capture Inc, a California-based company, to conduct an engineering study for a direct air capture plant in Northwest Louisiana, and a $37 million grant to New York-based Urban Mining Industries to build one of its low-carbon concrete manufacturing plants in Florida. Linde, the global industrial gas company based in Connecticut, had $10 million to build hydrogen fueling stations for heavy duty trucks in La Porte, Texas, clawed back. BKV, a Colorado-based natural gas company set to study the transportation of captured CO2 by barge throughout the Gulf Coast region, also had its $2.5 million grant canceled.
In addition to hurting investments and jobs in Republican states, the Department of Energy’s cancellations also target some unlikely victims. The list names 16 grants for General Electric, including 11 for GE Vernova, the company’s manufacturing arm, which produces natural gas turbines and components for wind energy generation; many of those awards were for wind technology research projects. The agency also canceled 24 grants for the Institute for Gas Technology and the Electric Power Research Institute, the research arms of gas and electric companies’ two biggest trade groups, respectively. Several of these awards funded research projects into carbon capture and storage.
Also on the list was a more than $6.5 million grant for a controversial study to retrofit the Four Corners coal plant in New Mexico with carbon capture equipment. The plant is currently scheduled to close in 2031.
Back in May, Wright promised Congress his agency’s review of Biden-era climate funding would be over by the end of the summer. “Certainly in the next few months, by the end of this summer — hopefully before the end of this summer — we will have run through all of the four or 500 large projects that are currently in the pipeline at the DOE,” he said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
As reported yesterday by Bloomberg, two regional Hydrogen Hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest — projects awarded funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to develop full hydrogen production and consumption ecosystems — are on the list. That leaves the agency’s intentions for the remaining five hubs scattered throughout the Midwest, Midatlantic, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Texas unclear. And while the list includes a few smaller grants for early-stage Direct Air Capture Hubs, it is still a mystery whether the Department of Energy plans to support the two more advanced direct air capture projects in Louisiana and Texas that were selected for $1.2 billion under the Biden administration.
His administration has zeroed in on $18 billion of projects that just so happen to be in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ hometown.
The shutdown punishment has begun, and it’s aimed at New York City.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget announced Wednesday on X that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” That includes funding for the Second Avenue Subway extension and the Gateway Program, a proposed rail tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey.
While Vought did not refer to the government shutdown specifically in his announcement, the timing is, shall we say, noteworthy, not least because the Democrats’ two top congressional negotiators — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are both from New York. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later made the link explicit, clarifying in a statement that the real issue with the two projects was a recently released rule — as in, published on Tuesday — “barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.”
There would be a review of the two projects “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring,” Duffy said, and “until USDOT’s quick administrative review is complete, project reimbursements cannot be processed.” Those reviews “will take more time” thanks to the shutdown, he wrote, reaching his denouement, as “without a budget, the Department has been forced to furlough the civil rights staff responsible for conducting this review.”
The politics behind this gambit are obvious. President Trump has consistently threatened to withhold funding from states, cities, and institutions controlled by or connected to his political opponents.
“I think they very much understand the political dynamics of trying to make an example of New York. They understand where Chuck Schumer lives,” Jackson Moore-Otto, transportation fellow at the Center for Public Enterprise, told me.
The White House wasn’t exactly running away from the political implications of the denial of funding on Wednesday.Vice President J.D. Vance arched a metaphorical eyebrow during a press conference, saying that “I'm sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies.”
Trump has also specifically threatened federal funding for New York City if Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the upcoming mayoral election.
Duffy himself could not have been any more obvious about what he is trying to achieve by slowing down this funding. “This is another unfortunate casualty of radical Democrats’ reckless decision to hold the federal government hostage to give illegal immigrants benefits,” his statement said, while also specifically calling out the two Democratic congressional leaders, saying that the delayed review was “thanks to the Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies [sic] shutdown.”
The legality of this — and its legitimate connection to the shutdown — is not so clear.
“It’s pure political maneuvering if you read the statement closely,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “They’re trying to blame the shutdown for slowing their review, but they’re also effectively saying that they’re considering New York in violation of their standards.”
Super also flagged several constitutional and legal issues with the action.
“The funding allocated through laborious means to the Hudson tunnel and Second Avenue Subway is a property right that entities in New York have,” he told me. “The idea that that can be interfered with because someone wants to do an investigation is a blatant violation of due process.”
While it is possible that purported civil rights violations could lead to funding being blocked, “that would have to be established through procedure, not suspicions that they’re doing something wrong,” Super said.
The new rule Duffy referenced addresses a specific set of programs established under the Small Business Act that are designed to give organizations controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” i.e. “women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups,” a shot at winning government contracts.
The DOT argues that under these programs, “two similarly situated small business owners may face different standards for entering the program, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex,” and that the rules and legislation defining them violate equal protection as set out in recent federal court decisions and Trump executive orders.
The rule that Duffy cites as justification for his actions is itself constitutionally suspect, Super said. “The Administrative Procedure Act requires public comment on new rules, subject to limited exceptions,” which this did not have.
The slapdash way the rule has been rolled out could open up the DOT to lawsuits, whether from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the New York City subway, or another entity involved with the Hudson tunnel project.
“Courts throughout history have insisted public comment is important,” Super said. The DOT is “violating procedures for issuing this policy and violating due process in the way they apply it.”
Moore-Otto also pointed out that the DOT release makes no specific claim that these projects are violating the rule.
“What they’re saying, it appears to me, is, New York might be doing this thing that we’ve just decided is illegal and we’re going to cut off your funding and it’s going to take longer because our lawyers aren’t being paid,” he said.
And there are broader issues around infrastructure policy at play beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, Moore-Otto pointed out. Duffy’s announcement links the supposedly unconstitutional women and minority contracting practices to the high costs that plague American infrastructure projects, saying they’re a “waste of taxpayer resources.”
But, Moore-Otto argued, what really ails U.S. infrastructure projects are extensive administrative reviews and the start-stop nature of project development.
“I think people would broadly agree the U.S. takes too much time and money to deliver infrastructure projects, and they are trying to invoke this as a pretext,” Moore-Otto said. “What strikes me as noteworthy is that when we look at why the U.S. does, in fact, take so long and use so much money building, while the rest of the world builds faster and cheaper, is that there’s a lot of stopping and starting of these infrastructure projects.”
“Assuming it’s a prolonged delay, it’s going to probably drive up costs — even though they’re saying it is a cost saving measure,” Moore-Otto added. “I think that should not be lost on anybody.”
