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The last 18 months have been a whirlwind at the Department of Energy.The agency went from freezing billions of dollars in federal energy grants early and canceling hundreds of awards, to reinstating many of them due to a court order, posting billions of dollars in new funding opportunities, and sending Congress a list of nearly 2,000 awards it plans to retain, including several large-scale industrial projects.
But for a broad category of smaller awards focused on local energy resilience, school retrofits, and energy efficiency — awards that never appeared on DOE’s project cancellation lists — are still sitting in limbo.
The Office of State and Community Energy Programs was established in 2022 to distribute roughly $16 billion in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to recipients like state, local, and Tribal governments as well as school districts. Programs housed within the office provided funding for projects designed to cut energy bills, repair schools, and bolster resilience in underserved communities around the country. Compared to the rest of DOE’s programs, these were unique, former staffers explained: These weren’t research and development projects or large-scale deployments, but for a time they had real momentum because of the immediate impacts for communities.
