Gutting DOE Clean Energy Offices: A $40 Billion Betrayal of Grid Reliability and Climate Action

Project 2025's blueprint for the Department of Energy calls for eliminating two key offices — the Grid Deployment Office (GDO) and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) — both established by statute in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. The stated rationale is to end "market distortions" and stop "picking winners and losers." As of late 2025, the Trump administration has followed through on key elements of this blueprint; the House Science Committee has declared the elimination of OCED illegal. These actions go far beyond budget trimming: they are a frontal assault on the federal government's core responsibility to ensure a reliable, affordable, and clean electricity grid.

Eliminating GDO and OCED isn't about neutrality — it's about handing the electric grid over to the same incumbents who have spent decades blocking transmission expansion and resisting clean energy deployment. GDO's work on the National Transmission Planning Study and National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor designations is precisely the kind of federal leadership that states and regions need to build the high-voltage backbone for a 21st-century grid. OCED's portfolio — including $8 billion for regional clean energy hubs and $3.5 billion for direct air capture — represents the only federal program designed to take breakthrough technologies from lab to market at scale. Killing these programs doesn't save taxpayer money; it locks in a brittle, fossil-dependent grid that will cost Americans billions in outage-related losses and public health damage.

The alternative is not to defend every grant as written, but to double down on public stewardship. The Green Industrial Policy research makes clear: the U.S. energy sector has always been a public-private partnership, with benefits accruing primarily to private shareholders. A publicly managed fossil fuel wind-down would create a Transition Coordination Administration and a public benefit corporation — Energy for America — to manage physical assets and ensure that the transition to clean energy benefits communities, not just corporate balance sheets. Instead of defunding OCED and GDO, Congress should expand their mandate to include community technical assistance and a detailed annual inventory of emissions, co-pollutants, and environmental justice impacts. The fight now is to restore what the administration has illegally taken away and to build the durable federal capacity that only a whole-of-government approach can deliver.