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

12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions · Notable · Needs Congress

Eliminate the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED)

Attempted

382 12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions

“Eliminate OCED. The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate all DOE energy demonstration programs, including those in OCED. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to subsidize preferred businesses and energy resources, thereby distorting the market and undermining energy reliability.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The office is not being wound down: it is still awarding. DOE announced a $500 million award to Cleveland-Cliffs' Middletown Works in Ohio, supporting a $1 billion investment to rebuild and upgrade the plant's coal-fired ironmaking furnace and capture its blast furnace gas — the restructured successor to an Industrial Demonstrations Program award, announced by the Assistant Secretary whose organization OCED sits under and published on OCED's own news listing. Ten months after the terminations that took 247 projects and $10.5 billion, the demonstration program the Quote asks Congress to eliminate is making new nine-figure awards. Under §3b this is real, dated Primary action on the ask's object that moves the other way, so it is carried on the `attempted` event rather than moving the rung.

  2. Attempted

    The President's FY 2026 discretionary budget request proposed canceling the demonstration programs OCED administers — a formal administration request, so `attempted` under §3b. DOE then terminated 24 OCED awards worth over $3 billion in May 2025 and 223 worth over $7.5 billion in October 2025: 247 projects and $10.5 billion, which is a great deal of money and is still not what the Quote asks for. Neither of the ask's two objects was delivered. OCED itself survives the November 2025 realignment as a sub-office of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, with a Director and a Deputy Director; and the demonstration *programs* the Quote names survive with it — OCED's own page still carries the Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs, the Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilots, Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs, the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program and Gen III+, the Industrial Demonstrations Program and long-duration storage, and is still soliciting and awarding under them. Terminating projects made under a program is defunding, not eliminating the program, and §3b's delivery test is the one that governs: where neither object is delivered the ordinary ladder still runs, and calling this `partial` would assert OCED is half-abolished when it is operating.

Research log

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

Research notes

Requires-Congress ask. A budget request is a formal administration request, so attempted; nothing has been eliminated.

Re-read 2026-09-01. Held at attempted. The question put was whether the 247 terminated awards worth $10.5 billion make this partial under the rule for Budget requests, which treats a request to expand funding the same way as a request to eliminate. They do not, for three reasons that all point the same way:

  1. The delivery test. “The test is delivery, not arithmetic: where neither object was delivered the ladder still governs” (#2125, the PCAOB). This Quote has two objects — OCED, and all DOE energy demonstration programs — and neither is delivered. OCED operates; every program named on its page operates.
  2. Executive action on a Requires-Congress ask is attempted if it routes around and partial if it eliminates (#827 vs #1596). Terminating awards leaves the office, its statutory basis and every program authority intact and in use; it removes projects made under them. That is the #827 side of the line, not #1596’s rescission of the regulations that embody the thing.
  3. Progress is measured on this ask. The ask is elimination, not defunding. A tracker that reads $10.5 billion of cancellations as half an elimination is measuring money rather than the ask — which is exactly what that rule’s own limits (“a Budget that proposes something else for the same object does not move the ask”) were written to stop.

The terminations are already carried as dated Primary Evidence on the attempted event, which is where real action on the ask’s object that satisfies neither limb belongs.

Softened on 2026-09-01: the note asserted that OCED “announced a $500 million steelmaking award in August 2026” with nothing citing it. Sourced 2026-09-06. The release is listed on OCED’s news page, energy.gov/oced/listings/oced-news, which redirects to energy.gov/cmei/oced/listings/oced-news; energy.gov’s own site search drops the search terms, which is why the award had looked unfindable. The release is dated from the publication time in the page’s metadata (2026-08-21T17:00:11-0400), not from the date shown on the page. It is now a second attempted event, because it is a dated act on the ask’s object.

The 20 November 2025 organization chart can be read as closing OCED. OCED is not closed — it was demoted to a sub-office of CMEI and its page (https://www.energy.gov/cmei/oced/office-clean-energy-demonstrations, read 2026-08-31) shows the office operating with named leadership.

Action
eliminate
Object
Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED)
ID
969