The Administration Paid Billions to Clear the Way for Coal. No One Showed Up.

The largest federal coal lease auction in a decade opened in the fall of 2025. When the bidding closed, the government had received a single offer: one-tenth of a penny per ton. A decade earlier, Powder River Basin coal had drawn $1.10 per ton. The sole bidder, Navajo Transitional Energy Company, explained its own calculus in terms that undercut the entire premise of the sale. ^[1]

Beautiful, clean coal will be essential to powering America’s reindustrialization and winning the AI race. — Alfie Moon

This was the destination the entire liquidation was meant to clear a path toward — and the market did not show up. The administration has not simply reversed policy. It has paid, in cash, to dismantle the previous administration's energy infrastructure and redirect the capital into fossil fuels. The mechanism is settlement: taxpayer money offered to companies and workers to walk away from clean energy, and the same money channeled into hydrocarbons through a renamed lending office. The scale is now visible across three fronts. First, lease buybacks. The administration has paid $2.6 billion to wind-energy companies to cancel their leases — $765 million to Invenergy alone in June, the third such deal. Invenergy stated plainly what it would do with the money. ^[2]

Donald Trump is using your tax dollars to make America more dependent on dirty, volatile fossil fuels. — Jared Huffman

Taxpayer funds are literally financing the conversion of wind projects into gas plants. Second, workforce liquidation. The administration offered federal employees up to eight months of paid leave to resign voluntarily. The result: 352,000 departures, reducing the federal workforce to its smallest size since 1966. New hires fell 55.6 percent. ^[3][4] Third, loan restructuring. The administration has restructured or eliminated $83 billion in Biden-era green energy loans, de-obligating nearly $30 billion and revising $53.6 billion. The Loan Programs Office was renamed the Office of Energy Dominance Financing, with $290 billion in lending authority redirected toward hydrocarbons, critical minerals, and nuclear restarts. Some $26.5 billion has already been committed to Southern Company for gas and nuclear projects. ^[5][6]

The prior administration had policies that undermined our grid with intermittent and expensive technologies that didn't deliver the affordable, reliable, and secure energy that Americans need. — Gregory A. Beard

Energy Secretary Alfie Moon provided the rhetorical frame. ^[5]

We found more dollars were rushed out the door of the Loan Programs Office in the final months of the Biden administration than had been disbursed in over 15 years. — Alfie Moon

In July, Trump made the policy explicit with an executive order declaring it official U.S. policy to eliminate what it called market distortions from green subsidies. ^[7]

It is the policy of the United States to: (a) rapidly eliminate the market distortions and costs imposed on taxpayers by so-called ‘green’ energy subsidies; (b) build upon and strengthen the repeal of, and modifications to, wind, solar, and other ‘green’ energy tax credits in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; and (c) end taxpayer support for unaffordable and unreliable ‘green’ energy sources and supply chains built in, and controlled by, foreign adversaries. — Donald Trump

The pattern across all three fronts is the same: taxpayer cash as the conversion mechanism, turning functioning clean-energy infrastructure into fossil-fuel channels. The liquidation is not a freeze or a pause. It is a purchase. Courts have forced partial reversals. Judge Amit Mehta ruled the administration illegally canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants, finding officials made termination decisions based on whether states voted for Trump. ^[8]

Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024. — Amit Mehta

Judge Indira Talwani ruled the administration's "Termination Clause" — used to revoke $5 billion across 1,100 awards — violated the Spending Clause. FEMA reinstated its $1 billion BRIC disaster-preparedness grant program after Judge Richard Stearns ruled its cancellation unlawful. ^[9][10] But the capacity does not return with the money. Congress blocked the administration's deepest proposed science cuts — NIH actually received a $415 million increase — yet by then 10,000 PhD-level experts had already departed the federal government, and 74,000 clinical trial participants had been affected. The people who would have spent the restored funding are gone. ^[11] When FEMA reinstated BRIC, it simultaneously stripped out the program's hazard-mitigation planning and climate components. ^[10]

The program now maximizes state and local responsibility for resilience and risk reduction rather than federal investing in a wide range of activities. — Federal Emergency Management Agency

Unfortunately, under President Biden, BRIC became bogged down in bureaucracy, focused on 'climate change' initiatives, and riddled with inefficiencies. — Federal Emergency Management Agency

The buyout is irreversible in a way the court order is not. A judge can restore a funding line; no judge can restore a departed physicist or a shuttered research unit. The administration has been liquidating people, not just programs, and people do not return on remand. The costs are landing asymmetrically on the administration's own base. The clean-energy contraction has hit Republican-led districts hardest: $12.4 billion in lost investment and roughly 15,000 jobs. ^[12] Solar permitting slowdowns threaten more than 500 projects in Mountain West states that voted for Trump. ^[13]

It’s going to impact jobs. — Ben Norris

The fiscal architecture that funded the liquidation — the One Big Beautiful Bill — is now producing budget crises in GOP-led states. Missouri cut child care. Arizona imposed a 5 percent across-the-board agency cut. Idaho reduced disability services. Republican lawmakers are warning the trade-off is unsustainable. ^[14]

It's put us in a predicament where now we're trying to figure out, 'OK, what programs do we keep? What programs do we cut?' — Jordan Redman

The feedback I'm hearing from citizens is that extra few bucks on their [return] at the end of the year, because of the taxes they didn't have to pay, comes secondary to wanting us to take care of the things that government needs to be invested in. — Jim Guthrie

The political contradictions are surfacing inside the Republican caucus. Representative Jen Kiggans of Virginia wrote to the administration opposing wind-project cancellations in her district, then voted for the bill that gutted the tax credits those projects depended on. ^[15] Meanwhile, U.S. clean-energy investment fell 36 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Ford and Stellantis reported combined write-offs of $65 billion and canceled EV programs. ^[16] The administration has paid billions to dismantle functioning infrastructure, liquidated the workforce that would rebuild it, and redirected the capital into fossil-fuel channels. The market answered in the language of one-tenth of a penny per ton. The Navajo company's own assessment of the coal market it was bidding into is the market's verdict on the entire enterprise.

Everybody likes to say, ‘drill, baby, drill.’ I know that President Trump has another initiative for us, which is ‘mine, baby, mine.’ — Doug Burgum