U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, and three Senate colleagues are urging the leaders of two Senate committees to secure a commitment from the Trump administration to begin reinstating cancelled U.S. Department of Energy clean energy grants before the Senate votes on a bipartisan permitting bill in less than two weeks.

In a letter released Oct. 27, Duckworth was joined by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon; Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon; and Edward J. Markey, D-Massachusetts. The letter went to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate committees on Energy and Natural Resources and on Environment and Public Works — Chairmen Capito and Lee and Ranking Members Whitehouse and Heinrich.

The senators say the Senate is scheduled to vote on the motion to proceed on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or BAAJA, on Nov. 9, 2026. They argue the permitting reform bill will only succeed if President Trump faithfully implements it, and they say the administration's record gives them no basis to assume he will.

"Beyond consideration of the actual text, the promise of BAAJA will only succeed if President Trump takes care that it is faithfully executed," the senators wrote. "The Trump Administration's record gives us no basis to assume that he will."

The cancelled grants

According to the letter, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced on Oct. 1, 2025, that nearly $8 billion in funding for energy projects in 16 states would be cancelled. The senators say Trump lost each of those states in the 2024 presidential election. They say the Department of Energy then terminated 321 awards supporting 223 projects, worth about $7.56 billion.

The senators cite two federal court cases. They say that on Jan. 12, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held in City of Saint Paul v. Wright that the terminations violated the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment. They say a July 15, 2026, stipulation in a separate case, Thakur v. Trump, had the Department of Energy agree that the inclusion of grants in the October 2025 terminations "was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient's state."

The senators say that to date the Department of Energy has restored only a small share of the terminated awards, some under court order, and that hundreds remain terminated.

Illinois project cited

Among the examples listed in the letter, the senators say the administration cancelled a project to prepare a site to store carbon dioxide underground near the municipally owned Dallman coal-fired power plant in Springfield, Illinois. The Dallman plant is operated by Springfield's city-owned utility, City Water, Light & Power, which has hosted a carbon capture research effort with the University of Illinois' Prairie Research Institute funded largely by the Department of Energy, according to the utility's website.

Other examples in the letter include a $210 million award to help small oil and gas producers find and fix methane leaks at roughly 22,500 wells; a pilot power plant testing efficiency technology that the senators say was cancelled after the Department of Energy had already paid more than $68 million of a $127 million commitment; and up to $1.2 billion for California's hydrogen hub, which the senators say threatened more than 200,000 jobs.

Concerns about the bill

The senators say BAAJA contains no language protecting against the president terminating the grants the legislation would help create. They also point to Executive Order 14215, asserting presidential supervision and control over independent regulatory agencies, and to the Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Slaughter, arguing those developments raise doubts about fair implementation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The senators ask committee leaders to obtain written confirmation from the Secretary of Energy, before the roll call vote on the motion to proceed, that the Department of Energy has begun reinstating every outstanding terminated award on a clear, swift timeline. They also seek a written guarantee that the administration will not terminate future awards because of the political identity of a recipient's state or the party affiliation of its officials.

"If BAAJA is intended to serve as an effort to restore fairness, then restoring these unlawfully terminated DOE clean energy awards would be a small but important first step to clarify that intent. This should not be a difficult request," the senators concluded.

Source: the original release