The Trump administration is canceling nearly $30 billion worth of loans for clean energy projects finalized under former President Joe Biden and will revise an additional $53 billion to support President Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which has been rebranded as the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, announced on Thursday that it is pulling back tens of billions of dollars‘ worth of loans finalized toward the end of the Biden administration.
The office said it is restructuring, revising, or completely eliminating over $83 billion in what it described as “green new scam loans and conditional commitments” made under the Biden administration.
The move follows a first-year review of the Biden administration loan portfolio, which was estimated to have around $104 billion in principal loan obligations.
“Over the past year, the Energy Department individually reviewed our entire loan portfolio to ensure the responsible investment of taxpayer dollars,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
“We found more dollars were rushed out the door of the Loan Programs Office in the final months of the Biden Administration than had been disbursed in over fifteen years,” Wright said. “President Trump promised to protect taxpayer dollars and expand America’s supply of affordable, reliable, and secure energy. Thanks to the Working Families Tax Cut, the newly re-structured Energy Dominance Financing is playing a key role in fulfilling that mission.”
Of the Biden administration’s $104 billion portfolio, the Trump administration said it eliminated roughly $9.5 billion that would have funded wind and solar projects, reutilizing those funds for natural gas and nuclear investments.
The agency is also in the process of de-obligating nearly $30 billion and will be revising $53 billion.
It was not clear which projects would have their funding stripped entirely or have their terms revised or renegotiated.
As of Dec. 5, the loan office has only three projects listed on its portfolio page, amounting to just over $4 billion. This includes the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a transmission upgrade project led by a subsidiary of the American Electric Power Company, and a project to utilize a coal plant to produce fertilizer in Indiana.
All other loans finalized under Biden have been removed from the portfolio.
The portfolio previously listed numerous loan commitments to electric and gas utilities, including 10 utility projects that totaled more than $27 billion.
As of last summer, more than $40 billion in loans still had a conditional commitment status, meaning these deals have yet to be finalized, and no money has yet been disbursed to the project developers.
At the time, Jennifer Downing, former chairwoman of the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, one of the lending office’s four main loan programs, told the Washington Examiner that these projects would directly support the administration’s energy agenda.
There was long speculation that the Trump administration would scale back the lending office’s capabilities or do away with it entirely, as the administration sought to slash government spending in the first few months of 2025.
Administration officials later made it clear that they planned to leverage the loan office to support the development of grid infrastructure, natural gas infrastructure, and, more prominently, new nuclear energy technology.
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“The biggest use of those dollars by far — the biggest use of those dollars will be for nuclear power plants, to get those first plants built,” Wright said in November.
The office currently has more than $289 billion available in its loan authority.
