After canceling billions of dollars in energy infrastructure contracts since President Donald Trump took office in January, the U.S. Department of Energy reportedly is eyeing $12 billion more in cancellations.
Trump ran in 2024 on a promise to reduce energy costs through what the White House called an “all of the above” approach, but the potential cuts could mean Americans will have to pay more to power their homes.
On Oct. 7, the news outlet Semafor published a list of clean energy and energy infrastructure projects that it says the Trump administration hopes to halt through contract cancellations. The “kill list,” as a source described it to Semafor, includes grants to improve the nation’s electrical grid and lower energy costs, including about $200 million in grants that would benefit Virginia or Virginia-based entities.
Included on the list are grants for electric vehicle charging stations, wind turbine manufacturing, grid expansion and modernization, and carbon capture.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
In August, after the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was canceling $8 billion in grants, including $156 million to help Virginians install solar panels, Virginia Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner said in a joint statement, “Between Trump’s tariffs on everyday goods, his efforts to kick 15 million people off of their health insurance, and this new decision to put lower energy prices further out of reach for American families, it’s clear that the President’s promises to lower costs are nothing but cheap talk.”
In addition to the Virginia cuts, three of the contracts included in the agency’s new list for possible cancellation, totalling about $9.3 million, were with Slipstream, a nonprofit headquartered in Wisconsin that promotes energy efficiency.
Scott Hackel, vice president of research for the organization, said in a phone interview that the grants were to be used to fund efforts to modernize building and energy codes to be more energy-efficient and a pilot program to help buildings use less energy for heating and cooling during peak usage periods.
Hackel said that the administration has not yet officially canceled those projects yet, but that they appear to be on the chopping block: “We’re still working on them, but looks like they’re at significant risk. We have heard the federal government say that they will likely continue to cancel more projects. And so we are doing what we can to keep that work moving as fast as we’re able to.”
Slipstream employs about 130 people, Hackel said. Should the grants to his organization and others in the state be canceled, he expects it will hurt both employment and energy efficiency. He said Slipstream has already had a small reduction in force this year, as have a lot of nongovernmental organizations, and predicted that service providers and contractors that work on Slipstream’s projects would also be adversely affected by any additional cuts.
If they are not canceled, the grants have the potential to bring down costs for consumers in the long term, Hackel said.
“Energy codes that are implemented well absolutely lead to lower utility bills for homes,” he said. “And on the load-flexibility side, you’re seeing a lot of discussion about this right now, that as the grid gets more constrained, utilities are having to implement more transmission lines. Utilities are having to build more peaker plants, and that is beginning to add to rates.”
When asked why the Trump administration should rethink its approach, Hackel pointed out that new methods are all geared toward lowering the cost of energy.
“This concept of energy efficiency and attempting to lower the cost of our energy infrastructure and our energy usage has been going for decades through multiple different types of administrations and different changes in our economy,” Hackel said. “And the idea of canceling massive portions of it right now is going to not only likely increase the cost of that energy, but put us behind competitively.”