October 01, 2026

Lofgren Demands Answers to Overdue Oversight Requests Regarding DOE Award Terminations, Warns Secretary Wright of Consequences for Continued Evasion

(Washington, DC) – On Monday, Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) sent a letter to Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Chris Wright demanding that he answer multiple months-overdue oversight requests from the Committee regarding DOE’s 2025 award terminations.

“For more than 15 months, my colleagues and I have attempted to conduct oversight of DOE’s award termination activities,” writes Ranking Member Lofgren in her letter. “We have asked questions, requested documents, and demanded answers directly from you during official testimony. But DOE has thwarted our oversight repeatedly by refusing to provide the requested information and documents. In doing so, DOE has hindered our ability to evaluate DOE’s actions and obstructed the Committee’s ability to fulfill its constitutional role. The following oversight requests from the 119th Congress remain outstanding, and DOE must comply with them.

1. Please provide to the Committee a comprehensive list of DOE officials who participated in the “Portfolio Review Process” in 2025 and 2026.

2. Please provide to the Committee copies of the “one pagers” or “one-page summary memos” that were created for each award being reviewed as a part of the “Portfolio Review Process.”

3. Please provide to the Committee copies of the assessments that were completed for each award terminated in May 2025 and October 2025 for the purpose of evaluating whether those awards had sufficiently met the criteria utilized by DOE under the “Portfolio Review Process.”

“Secretary Wright, these are straightforward requests for specific documents and information. I cannot help but believe that your ultimate goal in refusing to comply with them is to evade responsibility for your actions. Did you believe that you could arbitrarily terminate billions of dollars’ worth of awards, lie about the reasons why, and escape accountability? Now, as the political consequences of your actions mount, it appears you hope to quietly walk away from the entire issue, while Congress simply moves on without holding you accountable. That hope would be mistaken. Congressional oversight must be respected, and my oversight requests must be complied with. If DOE fails to do so, we will redouble our efforts using every available tool at our disposal. I urge DOE to comply now.”

Access the letter here and below.

Dear Secretary Wright,

In 2025, the Trump Administration illegally began to erase all traces of federal activity that it disagreed with. At the Department of Energy (DOE), you led the charge. You targeted billions of dollars’ worth of clean energy and infrastructure investments, engaged in a politicized “review” to cast a veneer of legitimacy over your arbitrary decisions, terminated awards that you disliked in a manner that was designed to inflict maximum pain on your political opponents, and then lied continuously to the public about why you had done it. The process was a sham and a disgrace, unworthy of the oath you swore to uphold the Constitution.

But now, as lawsuits accumulate, criticism mounts, and judges declare your actions illegal, you do not seem quite as proud of the decisions that were supposedly so righteous a year ago. Indeed, you appear eager to distance yourself from the award terminations of 2025 and to avoid responsibility for them. Since the early spring of 2025, I have attempted to conduct oversight of the Department’s actions to get to the bottom of what happened. DOE has evaded my oversight at every turn. This letter serves to reaffirm that my prior oversight requests from the 119th Congress pertaining to DOE’s award terminations remain outstanding. I expect DOE to comply. If the Department does not, it should prepare to face the consequences of its obstruction.

The story of DOE’s award terminations in 2025 has been told so many times by this point that it barely needs retelling. I will briefly do so merely to provide context for my oversight requests related to the issue. Upon taking office in January 2025, the Trump Administration immediately froze tens of billions of dollars’ worth of research, development, demonstration, and commercialization projects at DOE that had been awarded under the Biden Administration. In your first Secretarial Order on February 5th, 2025, released two days after you were confirmed as Secretary of Energy, you announced that DOE would “comprehensively review its R&D portfolio” without providing any additional detail. On May 15th, 2025, you initiated a new process to “conduct focused reviews of awards and other forms of financial assistance on a caseby-case basis,” while asserting that DOE possessed the discretion to “terminate [a] project based on the outcome of DOE’s evaluation.” This process, called the “Portfolio Review Process” or PRP, moved suspiciously quickly. A mere two weeks later, on May 30th, 2025, DOE announced the termination of 24 awards issued by the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) totaling more than $3.7 billion. Several months after that, on October 1st, 2025, DOE announced the termination of 321 additional awards from across the Department totaling roughly $7.56 billion. In both instances, DOE claimed that the terminations resulted from a “thorough and individualized financial review of each award,” during which the Department had concluded that the awards “were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” After the October 2025 award terminations, DOE also asserted that the awards “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs.” Finally, in April 2026, you appeared before a House Appropriations Subcommittee and testified that the PRP was complete and that no additional award terminations would be forthcoming.

The repercussions of DOE’s award terminations were immense. Projects were thrown into chaos, companies were pushed to the brink of collapse, and jobs were lost. Taxpayer dollars were wasted. Major clean energy research, development, and demonstration projects – indeed, entire nascent clean energy sectors – were destabilized. Congressional energy priorities enshrined in law were thwarted. We continue to deal with the fallout of these award terminations to this day. From the beginning, as the Ranking Member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (“the Committee”), I sought to conduct oversight of DOE’s actions in order to understand the processes and motivations that lay behind the Department’s attempt to wipe out over ten billion dollars in taxpayer-funded awards. On May 5th, 2025, I sent a letter to DOE along with a group of my Ranking Member colleagues in the House of Representatives and Senate that condemned the Department’s comprehensive freeze and review of Biden-era awards as “illegal and harmful to the public.” We asked how “DOE or any other part of the administration [is] assessing which DOE projects to cancel or continue, and under what criteria?” We did not receive a response from the Department before the PRP was announced on May 15th and $3.7 billion in awards was terminated on May 31st.

After DOE terminated the first round of awards on May 31st, Department officials provided a briefing for Committee Staff. Based upon the information disclosed in that briefing, I sent another letter to DOE on September 9th, 2025, along with two other Ranking Members, expressing “serious concerns” that the PRP was “haphazard, disorganized, and politically driven,” and calling upon DOE to “cease the cancellation process and restore respect for independent, merit-based reviews.” We also requested specific documents created during the Department’s review of OCED awards related to DOE’s evaluation of those awards and its assessment of whether the awards should be terminated, as well as a comprehensive list of DOE officials who had participated in the review process. DOE never provided those requested documents.

When DOE terminated more than $7.5 billion worth of awards on October 1st, 2025, the Department publicly claimed that the terminations were rooted in policy-based criteria such as economic viability, taxpayer return, and national energy priorities. You denied any political motivation behind the terminations in congressional testimony as recently as April and June 2026.3 But DOE’s cover story unraveled due to an unlikely source: its own concessions in court. Over the course of one lawsuit filed in November 2025, DOE formally stipulated that “a primary reason” for the October 2025 award terminations was “whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State’”; a judge ruled that DOE’s award terminations were unconstitutional and illegal in January 2026. Over the course of a second lawsuit related to the same terminations, DOE went even further and formally stipulated that the October 2025 award terminations were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” and that they were not based upon “any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

When you testified before the Science Committee on June 10th, 2026, Science Committee Democrats confronted you about the award terminations and reiterated the oversight requests that I had previously made to DOE. One of my colleagues, Energy Subcommittee Ranking Member Deborah Ross, demanded that DOE disclose the identities of the Department officials who participated in the PRP; once again, you refused to do so. Another one of my colleagues, Environment Subcommittee Ranking Member Gabe Amo, pressed you to explain the contradiction between your denials of any political motivation in the award terminations and DOE’s formal concessions in the November 2025 lawsuit; once again, you denied that any of the October 2025 award termination decisions were made based on politics. It was July 2026, the very next month, when DOE’s formal concessions in the second lawsuit – even more sweeping – became public, even though you had surely known about them when you testified before the Science Committee. Your materially false statements to the Committee left me with no choice but to formally refer you to the Department of Justice, which I did along with Ranking Member Amo on August 4th, 2026.

For more than 15 months, my colleagues and I have attempted to conduct oversight of DOE’s award termination activities. We have asked questions, requested documents, and demanded answers directly from you during official testimony. But DOE has thwarted our oversight repeatedly by refusing to provide the requested information and documents. In doing so, DOE has hindered our ability to evaluate DOE’s actions and obstructed the Committee’s ability to fulfill its constitutional role. The following oversight requests from the 119th Congress remain outstanding, and DOE must comply with them. Please provide the requested information and documents no later than 5:00 PM on Wednesday, October 14th, 2026:

1. Please provide to the Committee a comprehensive list of DOE officials who participated in the “Portfolio Review Process” in 2025 and 2026.

2. Please provide to the Committee copies of the “one pagers” or “one-page summary memos” that were created for each award being reviewed as a part of the “Portfolio Review Process.”

Secretary Wright, these are straightforward requests for specific documents and information. I cannot help but believe that your ultimate goal in refusing to comply with them is to evade responsibility for your actions. Did you believe that you could arbitrarily terminate billions of dollars’ worth of awards, lie about the reasons why, and escape accountability? Now, as the political consequences of your actions mount, it appears you hope to quietly walk away from the entire issue, while Congress simply moves on without holding you accountable. That hope would be mistaken. Congressional oversight must be respected, and my oversight requests must be complied with. If DOE fails to do so, we will redouble our efforts using every available tool at our disposal. I urge DOE to comply now.

Pursuant to Rule X of the House of Representatives, the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology “shall review and study on a continuing basis laws, programs, and Government activities relating to nonmilitary research and development.” The Committee possesses jurisdiction over “all energy research, development, and demonstration, and projects therefor, and all federally owned or operated nonmilitary energy laboratories, as well as the commercial application of energy technologies.”