In 2025, C2ES partnered with Greenline Insights to model the real-time economic costs of freezing federal energy and manufacturing funding programs, brought to life through a Live Funding Freeze Ticker. The analysis behind this tool was last updated in July 2025 and is presented here as an archive of that work. Learn more below.
Every day that the federal funding freeze continued, our economy was projected to lose irreplaceable opportunities and potential jobs. These losses were already permanent—we can’t recover what’s already slipped away. The Administration could have ended this freeze and released the congressionally-approved funding, before costs mounted further.
What were the projected costs if the funding wasn’t released?
in federal funding for clean energy and manufacturing were at risk if these funds were never released.
in wages from stalled projects, if funding was not released.
in economic opportunities and benefits.
The freezing of federal energy and manufacturing funding programs created real economic damage to America’s economy and global competitiveness. Every dollar that was kept on the sidelines was a dollar that was not being used to buy materials and equipment, pay workers, and support local economies more broadly.
The delay in releasing these funds meant that the United States missed opportunities to advance domestic manufacturing, create jobs, and develop the clean energy technologies that would shape the global economy for decades to come. The cost of delay was substantial and increased by the second. In fact, every day of delay translated into $10 million of lost economic output – money that was never recovered.
The logic was simple. Over time, goods and services got more expensive. A dollar spent the following year would not buy as much as a dollar at that time. That meant less economic value overall: less equipment and materials purchased, fewer people employed, and less real economic activity created in the communities where the projects were located. Because the total amounts of the grants were already fixed, the lost economic output from that lower purchasing power was gone forever.
These federal incentives had already catalyzed massive announced investments nationwide, demonstrating their potential to stimulate private sector investment, create high-quality jobs, and revitalize legacy manufacturing communities. The federal funding freeze, however, cast widespread uncertainty over those projects – and threatened to drive disinvestment from promising American energy and manufacturing projects.
C2ES partnered with research firm Greenline Insights to quantify the cumulative and accelerating impact of federal clean energy and manufacturing funding freezes.
As of July 2025, a select number of programs had enough data available to map their specific economic impacts to the state and congressional district level. Greenline Insights modeled the impacts of five distinct IRA investment programs:
The economic benefits of these select programs were modeled and mapped below. Select the “District Level” button below to view impacts at the Congressional District level, for programs with sufficient data available. Select the “State Level” button to view impacts of all programs at the state level.
The ticker displayed cumulative, irreversible economic losses resulting from the freeze of IRA programs. These figures represented the decrease in expected economic benefits relative to a counterfactual scenario where these programs were all implemented on time and as intended.
These values were expressed in real time and represented non-recoverable losses stemming from diminished purchasing power as time passes without program implementation. Finally, the “At Risk” metrics showed the total funding, economic cost, lost workdays, and lost worker income if the currently frozen IRA programs are never implemented.
Use the dropdown menu to explore data for specific agencies.
This analysis focused on measuring the potential economic benefits for several key federal energy and manufacturing funding programs, if they were implemented in full and on-time. Therefore, the estimates here represented what economic benefits were “at risk” from never implementing these programs.