How $600b Of Biden’s Clean Energy Funding Escaped Trump’s Cuts

President Donald Trump has spent more than 18 months demolishing Joe Biden’s expansive green agenda.

Yet pieces of the former president’s would-be legacy stubbornly cling to life — along with roughly $600 billion in congressionally approved spending that has so far escaped Trump’s wrecking ball, a new POLITICO analysis has found.

The breakdown sheds fresh light on one of the most endlessly repeated pledges of Trump’s second term: his vow to unravel the nearly $1.6 trillion in spending and tax breaks that Biden had set in motion for a sprawling array of climate, clean energy and infrastructure programs.

Trump and GOP lawmakers made good on a huge chunk of that pledge by wiping out more than $540 billion in Biden-era tax incentives for electric cars, wind and solar power and other climate-friendly technology.

But the spending portion of Biden’s legacy has proven more durable: Out of nearly $1 trillion in grants, contracts and other direct federal outlays provided by Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws, POLITICO found approximately $600 billion dollars remains available for recipients to spend or for federal agencies to award. Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that total $1 trillion — about $60 billion — though many of those cuts are still wrapped up in court challenges.

Now the fate of those leftover dollars is an emerging subplot in the November elections and in congressional efforts to prevent a government shutdown this fall.

It’s unclear how either party will treat the surviving money if they control Congress next year.

Even as Trump continues to denounce what he calls the “Green New Scam,” Republican senators are pushing a stopgap spending bill that would temporarily block the president from putting political appointees in charge of approving grants. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has vacillated between proposing more cuts and repurposing Biden-era dollars to fit the president’s priorities, such as the development of artificial intelligence.

Wavering agencies include the Energy Department, which decided in April to maintain most of its Biden-era grants after a lengthy review — in some cases, quietly reinstating funding it once cut.

Democrats are similarly split. While blue state attorneys general have fought efforts by the Trump administration to strip electric vehicle charging money and funding that would provide solar power to low-income communities, Democratic governors have watered down their states’ climate goals amid growing concerns over energy costs.

Renewable energy companies are debating whether to even push for a reinstatement of tax credits if Democrats win. Instead, the head of the country’s largest clean energy trade association said in July that the group would focus its advocacy on incentives that could have bipartisan support, such as domestic manufacturing and electric transmission.

Some Democrats with potential 2028 presidential ambitions have seized on the project terminations, touting clean energy as a way to create jobs and protect consumers from rising energy prices.

“In Republican-led states, they put their fealty to Donald Trump ahead of their people, and they've lost all that investment and all those jobs,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said in an interview early this year with POLITICO. "You can bet we're going to put the numbers in front of the American people."

Trump, meanwhile, continues to sound the same attacks on green energy that he made a constant theme during his campaign, when he pledged to redirect “all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent. … We will not allow it to be spent on meaningless Green New Scam ideas.”

In a statement to POLITICO, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers accused the Biden administration of “throwing away billions of precious American taxpayer dollars to waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“Thanks to President Trump, those days are over and his administration has successfully rooted out wasteful Green New Scam programs embedded throughout the federal government and is strengthening the accountability measures that were non-existent under the Biden administration,” Rogers said.

Trump’s cuts — and his wider efforts to repeal pollution regulations and shrink the staff at environmental agencies — have had a clear impact, blunting a budding rise in clean energy.

Automakers have canceled plans for electric vehicle factories. Power companies have traded wind projects for natural gas plants — in some cases, after the Trump administration has agreed to pay them $1 billion or more to make the switch. And investors in cutting-edge technologies such as green hydrogen and cement have been left twisting in the wind, unsure of whether government grants or loans will materialize.

The uncertainty over the fate of federal funding might be the biggest green killer of all. Some analysts worry that companies will hesitate to work with the federal government in the future, fearful that research into new technologies could fall victim to changes in Washington’s political winds.

“Significant damage has been done, and I think there is a big issue with trust,” said Alex Kizer, executive vice president of the nonpartisan energy research nonprofit the EFI Foundation and a former Energy Department contractor.

For Republicans, Trump’s cuts have added to the political quandary of addressing voters’ anger over spiking energy costs, especially with the rise of electricity-hungry data centers and the on-again, off-again war with Iran.

Democrats face their own challenge, however — selling Americans on the economic promise of clean energy programs that failed to excite voters when Biden’s policies were still in place.

Biden’s unspent billions

In 2024, POLITICO launched a yearlong analysis of Biden’s energy, climate and infrastructure initiatives, a suite of programs that supporters hoped would create jobs, lower prices, reshape the economy and help the U.S. avert catastrophic global warming.

Biden’s political ambitions were just as massive: By spreading the dollars and economic gains across the country, in red and blue states alike, he aimed to cement support for green programs among voters and lawmakers of both parties — an enduring legacy that no future president could easily undo.

Instead, the slow, uneven pace in doling out the dollars caused his attempt at a sweeping, New Deal-style national transformation to unfold in fits and starts.

Two laws were responsible for the bulk of Biden’s green initiatives: his bipartisan infrastructure law, passed in November 2021, and the climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, signed the following August.

Together, these laws contained nearly $1 trillion in direct government spending on grants, loans and contracts aimed at helping businesses, states and communities reduce climate pollution, spur domestic manufacturing and build roads, bridges, tunnels and transit. Of that, roughly $350 billion was for climate and clean energy, according to a POLITICO review of public guidebooks the Biden administration published on both laws.

Trump has attempted to cut at least 6 percent of that $1 trillion, POLITICO found by compiling data on all cancellations announced by federal agencies, listed on the government’s USA Spending website or tracked by outside groups. The review also included awards targeted by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency that were funded by either law. Those cuts include at least 37 percent of the $145 billion in direct spending provided by the IRA.

The total amount of the cuts may be even higher, but neither Congress nor the Biden or Trump administrations have provided a way to track all IRA dollars that the Biden administration awarded, and federal agencies did not provide comprehensive lists of cancellations at the time. POLITICO reached out to 10 federal agencies, including EPA, DOE and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“In just one year, the Energy Department has made great strides in ending the Biden Administration's Green New Scam," DOE said in a February statement to POLITICO. "Thanks to President Trump, this administration is committed to better stewarding taxpayer dollars and expanding the supply of affordable, reliable, and secure American energy." A department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment this week about the moves it has taken to cut and restore funding for Biden-era funding awards in the months since.

EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch told POLITICO that the grants approved by the Biden administration were "riddled with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, reduced agency oversight, and excessive and often unnecessary payments to middlemen. The Trump EPA has now proudly canceled $29 billion in grants to restore accountability with this precious taxpayer funding." A federal appeals court restored $17 billion in Biden-era EPA funding earlier this month. An EPA spokesperson said late Friday that the agency would appeal the ruling.

The administration has tried to cancel more than 1,150 grants, contracts and other awards amounting to at least $37 billion in unspent or canceled money, including $30 billion meant for organizations in Democratic-held congressional districts, according to the analysis. Congress also rescinded at least another $24 billion in future funding.

Trump often refers to the Biden administration's climate and clean energy funding as a "scam." Last year, two separate inspector general reports concluded a lack of oversight over some of the Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department climate-related awards could risk fraud, but did not include any evidence that fraud had occurred.

The loss of federal money has been felt nationwide, in small and large communities alike. But the overwhelming majority has been felt in blue states. Most of the dollars cut have been from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which provided money for a national green bank to solar projects in low income communities.

The Trump administration recently conceded in court documents that its announced termination of $7.5 billion in Biden-era clean energy funding was based "solely" on the projects’ location in blue states. Now Senate Democrats are demanding the administration revive those grants.

"Once an Administration begins punishing Americans for how they vote, the threat extends far beyond these projects: no state, community, business, or worker can trust that the federal government will apply the law fairly," 39 Senate Democrats wrote in July.

The courts have swatted down some of the grant cuts, deeming the administration’s actions unlawful. Elsewhere, groups fighting to revive their awards could see the matter taken up by the Supreme Court. That’s left a legal pathway for grant recipients to see their terminated funding returned — but it also means many projects are still unsettled.

Trump’s recent budget proposal calls for cutting a total of $23 billion in IRA and infrastructure law funding and would repurpose other existing funds, such as devoting $1.2 billion in unawarded Energy Department money to AI-related projects instead.

Trump has cut much deeper into the large bucket of Biden-era federal tax credits intended to help consumers purchase electric vehicles, utilities install renewables and companies advance nascent technologies, such as so-called green hydrogen.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed last summer eliminated an estimated $543 billion over the following 10 years, which represents the majority of the projected tax benefits from the IRA, according to estimates from Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Supporters of Trump’s agenda praise the aggressive rollback.

“We should get government out of the business of running our energy system,” said Jason Hayes, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He applauded Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright for “having the courage to make those cuts.”

But Democrats, environmentalists and some industry representatives say Trump’s cuts to climate spending could set the country back for generations, costing jobs and driving up energy prices while ceding technological supremacy to China in emerging industries such as electric vehicles.

“A focus on quality jobs and expanded domestic manufacturing based on clean energy still makes sense for what we need for affordability, for people's quality of life,” said Carla Frisch, who led the Energy Department’s Office of Policy during the Biden administration. “We can still make progress on that, but some of the actions being taken right now are actively eroding our ability to have that future.”

Impact of the cuts

What’s undeniable is that Trump’s cuts have disrupted Biden’s attempts to green the U.S. economy.

EV sales in the U.S. fell 4 percent in 2025, even as global sales of electric vehicles increased more than 20 percent. In just one year, the number of natural gas plants planning to come online by 2030 nearly tripled to about 66 gigawatts, equivalent to adding the combined generating capacity of Pennsylvania and Maryland, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

And investments in clean energy manufacturing for factories making everything from EV batteries to solar panels fell 17 percent to $41 billion in 2025, according to tracking from the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a recent update, the pair said investments in clean energy manufacturing increased in the second quarter of 2026, breaking six consecutive quarters of falling investment.

Even small-dollar cancellations can result in large real-world impact.

EPA canceled a $1 million grant to create a community and cultural center in Town of Bluff, Utah, a blue town in a red county where 57 percent of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024. The award was initially made under the IRA’s $3 billion environmental justice block grant initiative. It was canceled after the Trump-era agency announced that redressing social and economic disparities in environmental policy was no longer a priority, according to court documents.

“It's one thing to write a grant and not receive it,” said Bluff Town Manager Erin Nelson. “But it is a complete different animal when a year after the funding has been granted, that it gets ripped out from under you.”

A Trump cancellation is not always a death sentence for clean energy projects.

In some cases, wider economic tailwinds like the strong demand for electricity has helped offset the loss of federal money. A 400-megawatt solar project in Pennsylvania and a 578-mile transmission line connecting Kansas to Missouri are both moving forward, despite losing a $90 million DOE grant and $4.9 billion loan guarantee, respectively.

Elsewhere, other projects receiving federal dollars are chugging along.

The administration has signaled some willingness to maintain the Biden-era funding. In April, the Energy Department published a list of over 1,900 projects it planned to keep after conducting a year-plus review of Biden-era awards. That included reinstating someawards the department previously terminated — mainly for grid-related projects.

“We have finished that effort and we are keen to move forward with the majority of projects, which did pass [review], either straight up or through restructuring,” Wright said during a spring appearance on Capitol Hill.

The department ultimately retained or modified 86 percent of the projects it reviewed, he said. Most of those retained projects are located in red states.

“Why are they keeping it? Because it's a really important investment in our electricity and energy infrastructure all over the country, and particularly in communities that need that investment,” said Heather Boushey, who served on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Other analysts argue that the Biden era efforts to lower the power sector’s carbon pollution remain in place.

The IRA was meant to supercharge clean energy adoption that was already on the rise, said Alex Jacquez, a former Biden official at the White House National Economic Council.

“Clearly, there has been interference and political posturing around what the administration is able to control,” said Jacquez, now with Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank in Washington. “There's still good progress going on, and I think there's a lot to build on and to then learn from and not recreate exactly.”

But the damage could be particularly severe for emerging technologies, analysts said.

DOE terminated a $500 million grant for a California company experimenting with cleaner ways to make cement, and another $500 million grant for an Indiana cement plant looking to install technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide so that it doesn’t add to the warming of the atmosphere.

It also canceled a $316 million grant for a company building a factory manufacturing components for EV batteries in Kentucky. (That company, Ascend Elements, later declared bankruptcy.) And after being awarded a $1.6 billion Energy Department loan guarantee just days before Biden left office, a company seeking to make green hydrogen subsequently suspended the work related to it.

It will likely take years to assess the full impact of those cuts, said Derrick Flakoll, an analyst who tracks the energy industry at the consulting firm BloombergNEF.

He pointed to the example of Tesla, which received a $465 million Energy Department loan in 2010 that helped it grow into an electric vehicle behemoth. Fifteen years later, it was Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, who championed Trump’s staffing and budget-cutting efforts under the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“Are there Teslas in the chemical electrolysis or green cement or green steel spaces that will die because they don't have federal support?” Flakoll said. “It's very hard to quantify that.”