The Clean Energy Innovation Funding Freeze

The Live Funding Freeze Ticker—developed by Greenline Insights in partnership with C2ES—illustrates the real-time economic costs of freezing federal energy and manufacturing funding programs.

What's at Stake?

Every day that the federal funding freeze continues, our economy loses irreplaceable opportunities and potential jobs vanish. These losses are already permanent—we can’t recover what’s already slipped away. The Administration can end this freeze today and release the congressionally-approved funding, or watch the costs mount further.

What will the cost be if the funding is never released?

$141,258,150,000

in federal funding for clean energy and manufacturing is at risk if these funds are never released.

American workers could lose

$114,591,750,518

in wages from stalled projects, if funding is not released.

If these projects do not move forward, the United States risks losing

$321,872,032,118

in economic opportunities and benefits.

The Real Cost of Delay

The freezing of federal energy and manufacturing funding programs is creating real economic damage to America’s economy and global competitiveness. Every dollar that is kept on the sidelines is a dollar that is not being used to buy materials and equipment, pay workers, and support local economies more broadly.

The delay in releasing these funds means that the United States is missing opportunities to advance domestic manufacturing, create jobs, and develop the clean energy technologies that will shape the global economy for decades to come.

The cost of delay is substantial and increasing by the second. In fact, every day of delay translates into $10 million of lost economic output – money we’ll never get back.

The logic is simple. Over time, goods and services get more expensive. A dollar spent next year won’t buy as much as a dollar today. That means less economic value overall: less equipment and materials purchased, fewer people employed, and less real economic activity created in the communities where the projects are located. Because the total amounts of the grants are already fixed, the lost economic output from that lower purchasing power is gone forever.

These federal incentives have already catalyzed massive announced investments nationwide, demonstrating their potential to stimulate private sector investment, create high-quality jobs, and revitalize legacy manufacturing communities. The current federal funding freeze, however, is casting widespread uncertainty over those projects – and threatening 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.

Explore State and Local Impact

A select number of programs have 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:

  1. Rural Energy for American Program (REAP)
  2. Low Carbon Transportation Grants
  3. Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment (EIR) Program
  4. Domestic Vehicles Grant Program
  5. Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) Projects

The economic benefits of these select programs are 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.

EXPLORE THE DATA

  • What the Ticker Measures

    The ticker displays cumulative, irreversible economic losses resulting from the freeze of IRA programs. These figures represent the decrease in expected economic benefits relative to a counterfactual scenario where these programs were all implemented on time and as intended.

    • Cost to the U.S. economy: The loss in total dollar value of all economic activity that would have been generated had IRA funding been deployed as intended.
    • Lost work days: A measure of total labor effort, calculated as one job sustained for one day. For example, a construction project employing 100 full-time workers for 100 days would generate 10,000 job-days. This metric allows for the aggregation of short-term and part-time employment impacts into a single, time-weighted measure.
    • Lost worker income: The aggregate compensation to workers—including wages, salaries, benefits, and proprietor income—that will no longer occur.

    These values are expressed in real time and represent non-recoverable losses stemming from diminished purchasing power as time passes without program implementation. Finally, the “At Risk” metrics show 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.

  • What the Map Measures

    This analysis focuses 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 represent what economic benefits are “at risk” from never implementing these programs.

  • Detailed Methodology

Learn More