In Wisconsin, Alliant Energy has canceled a project aimed at minimizing power outages in disadvantaged and tribal communities. This decision followed the Trump administration’s termination of a federal grant that was intended to support the initiative.
In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District has not been reimbursed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for its work on deploying and upgrading advanced smart meters since October. This halt in funding came after the Trump administration decided to eliminate grants it claimed were supporting “the Left’s climate agenda.”
In the upper Midwest, a consortium of regional grid operators, utilities, and state agencies is awaiting $464 million in DOE funds intended for constructing high-voltage transmission lines to alleviate grid congestion. The agency overseeing the project assures that the funding will soon be reinstated.
Nationwide, hundreds of projects aimed at enhancing grid reliability and making electricity more affordable face an uncertain future due to actions by the Trump administration, which have significantly slowed the distribution of DOE funds.
According to recent reporting by The New York Times, some projects in “blue states” were specifically targeted as political retribution. A few grant recipients have successfully challenged these terminations in court, and others continue to seek legal remedies.
However, many others are affected by the DOE’s broader inability to fulfill its congressional mandates, according to groups monitoring the agency since early last year. Across both red and blue states, the DOE is requiring thousands of grantees to undergo a labor-intensive review process, leaving many projects stalled without clarity on when funding might resume.
An April report from the DOE Alumni Network revealed that the DOE has terminated 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025 and threatened to end 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.
The report also noted that the DOE has stalled projects for “a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” indicating the agency is not resolving disputes or finalizing conditional awards, thus freezing promised funds.
“The DOE overtly canceled some projects and then for 15 months stopped actively managing others,” said a former DOE official. “Projects can’t move to the next stages without their next tranche of funding.”
The former official, who requested anonymity, described this as a pattern of stalling and “ghosting” utilities, state governments, energy companies, and nonprofit groups awarded grants under the Biden administration.
Many projects have been caught up in a process the DOE announced in May 2025 to review all financial assistance “on a case-by-case basis to identify waste of taxpayer dollars, protect America’s national security and advance President Trump’s commitment to affordable, reliable, and secure energy.”
In October, the DOE announced the termination of 321 financial awards supporting 223 projects—all tied to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. This announcement followed a social media post by Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, stating the administration would cancel “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding.”
Canary Media contacted a subset of DOE grantees who received funding from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DOE issued more than 100 GRIP grants in October 2023, August 2024, and October 2024 for projects to expand the grid, defend it against extreme weather, establish microgrids to protect vulnerable communities, and deploy technologies to integrate solar, wind, EVs, and batteries.
Some GRIP projects involve clean energy expansion and serving disadvantaged communities, two areas criticized by the Trump administration. However, many others are straightforward grid improvement projects requiring federal dollars to offset the costs borne by utilities and regional or state agencies.
The largest project in California involved a $630.6 million DOE grant awarded in 2024 to upgrade more than 100 miles of high-voltage power lines with advanced power cables capable of carrying more electricity along existing transmission corridors. This project, estimated to deliver about $200 million in efficiency savings, was terminated in October, with no funds disbursed according to federal records.
This uncertainty appears to apply to the majority of GRIP projects, according to Emlyn Bottomley, founder of the consultancy High Road Analytics, which focuses on workforce development, and a former Department of Labor deputy policy director in the Biden administration.
According to his tracking of federal spending, of the roughly $11.4 billion in DOE funds obligated to grid infrastructure and resilience—a category that includes GRIP program funds—$9.1 billion remains “at risk,” with funding stalled or timelines for completion shortened. That’s compared with $400 million in grants that have been canceled outright and $1.3 billion not yet disbursed but showing no signs of being stalled.
“It’s a shame these projects are being held up or canceled, especially since the case for them is fairly bipartisan—spanning national security, economic competitiveness, and cost and affordability,” Bottomley said.
All of the GRIP projects required partners to provide matching funds at an amount at least equal to the money DOE is providing, the former DOE official added. “You’re talking about folks putting hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. People have skin in the game for these awards.”
The costs of losing federal funding
Many of the GRIP grantees contacted by Canary Media declined to comment, citing ongoing discussions with DOE. Others reported that they are no longer pursuing the projects as described in their grant applications, at least not with the help of DOE money.
The latter is the case for Alliant Energy’s Smart Power Automation in Rural Communities (SPARC) project, which won a $50 million grant in late 2024 to add grid visibility and control devices to 140 grid circuits in disadvantaged and tribal communities served by subsidiary Wisconsin Power & Light—a utility in a blue state.
Those devices could allow the utility to quickly find and isolate faults on its grid, cutting power outages in targeted communities by up to 50 percent. They could also support grid-management software to help integrate more renewable and distributed energy, and potentially expand wireless communications access to these remote areas.
Alliant “voluntarily withdrew” from the grant award process in April, six months after its grant was terminated by the DOE, Alliant spokesperson Melissa McCarville told Canary Media. The agency has disbursed no funds to the project, according to federal records.
Alliant is “actively pursuing many of the goals that were outlined in the SPARC project,” McCarville wrote in a May email, but as part of a 10-year strategic plan with no set timeline. “While the grant did provide valuable funding, it also required a significant investment, and we want to ensure our contributions are properly prioritized,” she wrote.
Still, at least one grant-funded project in a blue state is proceeding despite the absence of DOE funds.
That’s the case for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, which serves the state’s capitol and environs. In 2023, SMUD won a $50 million grant to support a project to deploy 200,000 smart meters and grid devices and underlying software controls to “improve grid reliability, resilience, visibility and efficiency,” utility spokesperson Gamaliel Ortiz told Canary Media in an email.
SMUD has carried out much of that work, which includes close to $100 million in utility spending, and has received almost $33 million in reimbursements from DOE, according to federal records. However, SMUD “has not received reimbursement for any costs incurred after the grant was cancelled on October 10, 2025,” Ortiz wrote. “We remain committed to this critical work and stay flexible as we evaluate how the loss of grant funding may impact the project timeline.”
In other blue states, some grants have been canceled and others are still under negotiation. In Oregon, utility Portland General Electric has recently learned that the DOE may reinstate a previously terminated $50 million grant to support next-generation “grid edge computing” devices, utility spokesperson John Farmer told Canary Media in an August email. That project had received only $1.2 million in DOE funding, according to federal records.
The purpose of the project was to integrate batteries, EVs, and community solar into its grid to “improve resilience, enable the integration of distributed energy resources, and maximize customer investments in home energy solutions.”
“PGE is evaluating the benefits and risks of reinstating the grant,” Farmer told Canary Media. The utility “recognizes that there are inherent risks of additional and changing demands by the DOE as the administration’s priorities change.”
At the same time, PGE remains in discussion with the DOE on a $250 million grant to build a high-voltage transmission line with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Farmer wrote. “Without this funding, we would lose the opportunity to offset those costs with external dollars, which could limit how efficiently we can advance needed grid improvements.”
Red state projects are also being held up because the grantee is located in a blue state. Such is the case of the aforementioned $464 million DOE grant for the Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue project to build new transmission lines between the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Southwest Power Pool, two grid operators spanning nearly a dozen Midwestern states.
The $464 million GRIP grant was meant to bolster $1.3 billion in matching funds from utilities in the region to enable nearly 30 gigawatts of new generation to be built in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All but one of those states voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election — but the Minnesota Department of Commerce, the entity awarded the grant, is in a blue state.
In May, the Minnesota Department of Commerce announced that the DOE “will honor its $464 million grant,” which will “unlock more than $1 billion in additional private investment and provide communities across the region with economic and infrastructure benefits.”
A DOE spokesperson told Canary Media in a July email that the DOE has conducted its review of GRIP projects based on a “number of criteria,” including whether it has “achieved the milestones set forth in the terms of the award,” whether it “remains technically and economically feasible,” and whether it “continues to effectuate the purpose of the program or the Department’s priorities.”
The spokesperson added that “none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” That statement is belied by court testimony reported by The New York Times last month, in which a DOE lawyer stated that none of the October grant terminations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor,” and that all but one of them “had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”
During a series of congressional hearings in April, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated that the DOE’s review of more than 20,000 grants was almost complete, and that more than 80 percent of grantees had received notice that their awards could proceed as is or with modifications.
But an Alumni Network analysis of DOE data shared with Congress showed that the DOE’s review both failed to restore the vast majority of projects caught up in the “blue state” termination action in October and failed to address the hundreds of projects that have never been officially terminated but remain unable to secure funds.
The revelation of the DOE’s explicit targeting of blue states for grant termination spurred 39 Senate Democrats to sign a letter to Wright and Vought demanding the immediate restoration of funding for DOE projects terminated in October.
“Once an administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote,” the senators wrote, “the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly.”
