Trump is blocking billions of dollars of grants that would fix the grid

The Trump administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars in federal grants meant to strengthen the electric grid, leaving utilities across the country stuck mid-project. The Department of Energy has terminated 356 awards worth $12.5 billion since January 2025 and threatens to cancel 303 more worth $12.2 billion, mostly under a program called Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships, or GRIP, created by the 2021 infrastructure law. Court testimony reported by the New York Times found the October terminations were not based on cost or performance, but on whether a project's state had voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.

The fallout is already visible. In Wisconsin, Alliant Energy dropped a $50 million project that would have cut power outages in rural and tribal communities by up to half. In California, Sacramento's municipal utility has kept building out 200,000 smart meters on its own dime after losing DOE reimbursement. In Oregon, Portland General Electric is weighing whether to accept a possible reinstatement of grant money for grid technology tied to home batteries, EVs, and solar. A separate $464 million grant for new transmission lines across the upper Midwest was also caught up in the freeze, even though it mostly serves states that voted for Trump, because the agency managing it is in Minnesota.

For homeowners, this matters mainly as backdrop: these are utility-scale upgrades to make the grid more reliable and cheaper to run, not direct rebates to individual households. But delays or cancellations could mean slower improvements to power reliability and higher costs passed on through utility bills in affected areas.