Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions · Notable

Back no new DOE loans or loan guarantees

Reversed

383 12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions

“To save tax dollars and reduce current risk, the new Administration: Should not back any new loans or loan guarantees.”

What has happened

  1. Reversed

    A refrain-from ask, sorted and leveled under playbook 3b: the Administration is the actor and its own inaction is the compliance, so the ask is `done` while no new loan is backed and `reversed` the day one is. DOE backed no new loan for the first ten months of the window — it spent them reviewing the inherited portfolio, and on 2025-12-17 announced it was restructuring, revising or eliminating more than $83 billion of it — but on 2025-11-17 the Loan Programs Office closed a new $1 billion loan to Constellation Energy Generation for the Crane Clean Energy Center, and the office has lent steadily since. As the renamed Office of Energy Dominance Financing it closed a $26.5 billion loan package to two Southern Company subsidiaries on 2026-01-25, a $1.6 billion loan to DTE Gas on 2026-06-04, and a loan of up to $3.26 billion to AEP Texas on 2026-07-08, and on 2026-06-04 issued a $17.5 billion conditional commitment for the American Nuclear Supply Chain Loans. The statutory basis is P.L. 119-21 sec. 50403, which appropriated a further $1 billion to the Energy Policy Act section 1706 program and widened its eligibility — Congress funding the lending the Quote asked the Administration to stop.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

P.L. 119-21 section 50403 appropriated a further $1,000,000,000 to carry out the Energy Policy Act section 1706 program and widened its eligibility, which is the statutory basis for the new lending. #975 reads the same section for the limits Congress did place on it.

  • Reviewed 2026-09-01: this is a refrain-from ask, one the administration satisfies by not acting, so the Status moved from not started to reversed, dated 2025-11-17, the first new loan closed in the window (the earlier date was 2026-08-31). An earlier note said DOE “backed new loans throughout the window”, which the record does not support: nothing was closed before November 2025.
  • The earlier Evidence was replaced. Two of its three items did not carry the claim: the National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor cancellation is about transmission corridors, not loans, and energy.gov/EDF is a standing office landing page with no date of its own. Each loan now has its own dated DOE announcement, all four read on 2026-09-01 and dated from the publication date in each page’s metadata: 2025-11-17, 2026-01-25, 2026-07-08, 2026-06-04.
  • The Crane loan’s conditional commitment was issued in March 2024, before the window; the closing is nonetheless this Administration backing the loan, and it is the earliest such act found. The counter-current is real and is in the note: on 2025-12-17 DOE announced it was restructuring, revising or eliminating over $83 billion of the inherited portfolio (https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-reins-over-83-billion-biden-era-loans-and-conditional-commitments). That is portfolio management, not a refusal to back new loans, so it does not hold the ask at done.
  • A broken refrain-from ask is written as a single reversed event; the ten-month compliance period rests on a negative with no dated instrument of its own.
Action
restrict
Object
DOE loans and loan guarantees
ID
972