Today marks six months from DOE’s October 1, 2025 award terminations. It’s been long enough to understand the trends, and we can now see that DOE is moving extremely slowly to resolve the disputes that hundreds of awardees filed regarding those terminations. Through the process, we’ve also uncovered a much larger pattern of disruption at play - there are many more DOE awardees who aren’t terminated, but who are frozen. They don’t have access to the funds they were awarded to either start, or continue their projects.

Those details have been collected to create the DOE Alumni Network’s first report, “INNOVATION INTERRUPTED: The Lasting Impact of Grant Terminations and Freezes at the U.S. Department of Energy,” that details the events leading up to last year’s October 1 terminations, as well as additional disruptions that include freezing projects at stage gates, not finalizing conditional awards, and reducing new solicitations. These trends put the collective goals of those projects for our energy sector, infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing at risk.

Read the full report here and find our key takeaways below. The DOE Alumni Network continues to monitor financial assistance at the Department and will provide additional analysis in the coming weeks.

Key Takeaways

The Scale of Terminations and Funding at Risk is Massive: DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards since January 2025, totaling $12.5 billion in federal funding. It has also threatened to terminate an additional 303 awards worth $12.2 billion. This action is part of a larger pattern of disruption that includes freezing projects at stage gates, not finalizing conditional awards, and reducing new solicitations, which puts Congressional goals for our energy sector, infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing at risk.

DOE Admits Terminations Were Made on a Partisan Basis: Actions Ruled Unconstitutional: The 321 awards announced terminated on October 2, 2025, were primarily chosen based on their business registration addresses being in “blue states”. In the lawsuit St. Paul v. Wright, the DOE admitted that the political identity of the grantee’s state played a “primary role” in the termination decisions. The judge subsequently ruled these terminations were unlawful and violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. The St. Paul awardees who sued have been reinstated by DOE since.

Widespread Award “Ghosting” and Administrative Freeze Continues: DOE is “ghosting” the vast majority of terminated awardees and hundreds of other awards on the leaked cancellation list, along with a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list. This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.

Long Term Repercussions Exist for U.S. Energy Innovation: DOE’s actions profoundly undermine the reliability of federal grants as a mechanism for achieving national energy goals. This disruption has created deep uncertainty among private sector partners, with some awardees stating they will no longer pursue future DOE funding, posing a long-term risk to domestic energy innovation and deployment.

Read the full report for more details.

###