Six Months Later: The Fallout of the DOE’s $7.5 Billion in Canceled Clean Energy Projects

How Holyoke got “Trumped”

In the spring of 2024, Holyoke, Massachusetts, a former mill town struggling to rehabilitate its old factories, received good news. It would receive an infusion of investment to bring in clean industrial manufacturing. In May of that year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) granted cement maker Sublime Systems $87 million (to be matched dollar-for-dollar with private investment) to build a full-scale production facility in Holyoke. In line with the historic investment in industrial manufacturing, the plant promised to bring permanent union jobs to the town alongside hundreds of jobs for constructing the facility.  

Sublime Systems was not a typical cement company. A venture-backed start-up founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, Sublime uses a novel cement-making process that cuts carbon pollution by more than 75 percent compared to traditional production methods. The Holyoke facility would be Sublime’s first full-scale commercial plant. After the DOE’s award, the facility generated interest, attracting private investment from global companies and contracts with firms like Microsoft. As the United States competes with other large economies on innovative industrial manufacturing and as jurisdictions like the European Union are penalizing imports of dirty materials, the Sublime facility would help the United States gain a competitive advantage in a changing global economy.  

Then, in early 2025, things took a turn for Holyoke. The Trump administration abruptly canceled Sublime’s award without a clear explanation. Within months, Sublime paused work on its proposed Holyoke facility and later laid off roughly two-thirds of its workforce. In the words of Holyoke Mayor Joshua A. Garcia, who described the canceled award as a big missed opportunity, “we got Trumped.” 

Holyoke’s story is not an isolated one. As a recent report from the DOE Alumni Network details, across the country, hundreds of similar DOE-funded energy and advanced industrial manufacturing projects, representing billions in promised investment, have been canceled or frozen. Like Holyoke, industrial towns across America are getting “Trumped.”  

DOE Alumni Network report exposes pattern of harm  

The DOE Alumni Network report marks six months since the DOE canceled 321 awards in October 2025. The tally is even larger when counting all terminations since January 2025: a total of 356 awards across six DOE offices have been terminated, amounting to $12.5 billion in federal funding. In sum, the report finds that these canceled projects pose “a long-term risk to domestic energy innovation and deployment.”  

But these projects are more than just numbers on a page. Cities like Holyoke were counting on the government to come through as a reliable partner to clean up industrial manufacturing, create good jobs, and reduce energy costs. Companies that received federal investment also entered into agreements with their host communities to promote broad-based economic opportunities by, for instance, sponsoring workforce development initiatives. Under the Trump administration, the federal government did not follow through on its commitments. Projects were swiftly terminated, and investments that would have created more than 235,000 new clean energy manufacturing jobs were undone. 

Why the Trump administration made these decisions is far from clear. Projects like the Sublime facility at Holyoke were originally selected after a year of rigorous review and strict project selection criteria. That rigor was conspicuously lacking in the process that the DOE later used to decide which projects to keep and which to terminate; a process that the DOE Alumni Network describe as “highly unusual.” In May 2025, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright released a new policy for evaluating DOE investments called the Portfolio Review Process (PRP). In stark contrast to the Biden administration’s guardrails to prevent political interference with project selection, the new administration’s Portfolio Review committee was “staffed with Trump administration political appointees and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) officials.” As the DOE Alumni Network report describes, this group of political officials made decisions based on extremely limited information: Reportedly, the fate of thousands of good jobs was made based on a review of one-page summaries drafted by the political appointees. It also remains unclear how DOE officials judged those one-page memos: “DOE has not, to date, fully clarified its processes for how it chose the types of awards the PRP reviewed or for the criteria it used for termination.” NRDC has since sued the DOE for violating the Freedom of Information Act after the DOE failed to respond to two separate requests on the DOE’s terminations of Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations programs.  

Communities left waiting  

The extent of the fallout from the Trump administration pulling back investments in energy innovation is still taking shape. Many awardees have appealed their terminations and are still waiting for final determinations from the DOE. Others remain in a more confusing state of limbo: The DOE Alumni Network notes that, as of its report’s publication, some awardees have been “ghosted” by the DOE (i.e., they have received no communication and no approvals for advancing their projects from the department). For the 303 projects that are still under contract but under threat, 164 of them have had their funding frozen and have not received any payments since October 1, 2025. These 164 frozen projects are all in states that voted for President Trump in 2024. These awardees face the threats of job loss for their workers, the costs of project delays, and the continuing uncertainty that further undermines private sector trust in federal grant programs.  

Even as awardees await final decisions from the administration, the consequences of these undone commitments are already being felt in communities across the country. One of the country’s largest cement facilities, owned by Heidelberg Materials, was set to demonstrate carbon capture and geologic storage at its Mitchell, Indiana facility, allowing it to capture around 2 million tons of carbon—the equivalent of 435,000 cars in one year. This project was terminated in May 2025, stalling progress on a project that would have created more than 1,000 jobs. Meanwhile in Middletown, Ohio, in the face of canceled and stalled Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs awards, Cleveland-Cliffs has decided to abandon its green steel project and instead reline its coal-based blast furnace, locking in antiquated technology and negative air pollution impacts for the surrounding community. Holyoke is clearly not the only community that “got Trumped.”  

It’s not too late to repair the damage 

The Trump administration still has an opportunity to pull back on its decisions. As of now, the DOE has reached a final decision to cancel only 30 projects totaling $967 million. The remaining 96 percent of overall federal funding associated with terminations and delays can be brought back and fully implemented. The department still has the chance to reduce energy bills with innovative technologies, clean up manufacturing, and bring high-quality jobs to the American workers.  

If this administration truly wants to achieve “energy dominance,” it needs to invest in energy innovation and in the sectors that form the backbone of the U.S. infrastructure and the clean energy economy, or it risks falling further behind in the global race to build and manufacture the next generation of energy technologies.