Anti-Energy Grants Should Be in the DOGE Crosshairs

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of investigations into federal grants to nonprofits that Capital Research Center is conducting. We are pleased the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and others are exploring the vast forest of nonprofits trying to influence the U.S. government—an area that Capital Research Center has spent years mapping.

This article explores grants made by the Department of Energy.

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If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

—allegedly (but probably not) Henry Ford.

The Ford Motor Company’s electric vehicle (EV) division regularly loses as much per sale as most Americans are willing to pay for any type of vehicle. While Ford’s leadership should be blamed, the federal government has also been an eager co-conspirator. If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) succeeds in its eponymous mission, an underappreciated benefit could be improved private-sector efficiency at firms such as Ford.

In a late October report on Ford’s EV woes, energy journalist Robert Bryce wrote that “the storied automaker lost $58,391” for every electric vehicle it sold during the third quarter of 2024. Bryce has also reported that Ford bled out $64,731 per EV sale during all of 2023, up from $34,000 lost per EV sold in 2022. While still generally profitable overall because Americans remain loyal buyers of Ford’s fossil-fueled trucks and SUVs, Bryce has tabulated that the EV division’s red ink since 2022 has flowed past $10 billion.

Why has Ford been so determined to waste $10 billion making products customers don’t want to pay for?

Just one giveaway from the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is a program to encourage production of EV batteries. It’s estimated 10-year price tag exceeds $200 billion, and Bryce wrote in June 2023 that Ford alone had already received $9.2 billion from the program to build three EV battery factories.

Blow a few billion here and there, and it can add up to real money!

Ford’s EV challenges are not unique. A November report from the Associated Press reported American EV sales were slowing, and that was before anticipated threats from the incoming Trump administration to remove $7,500 per vehicle purchase credits on cars that cost about $8,000 more than traditional internal combustion vehicles. When Germany recently removed its EV credits, reported the Associated Press, sales plummeted.

The EV and electrification subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are just two examples of targets that should be in the DOGE crosshairs.

Anti-Energy Grants from . . . the Department of Energy?

Last December the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) began spending a $6 million solar energy grant from the Department of Energy. The EDF opposes the use of hydrocarbon fuels and has even cheered on the closure of carbon-free nuclear energy plants. This means that a recipient of a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is opposed to 92 percent of the energy used in the United States.

As the kids say these days, “You had ONE job!”

While the EDF is one of the nation’s most prominent anti-energy nonprofits, it isn’t even the most egregious example of those receiving multi-million-dollar gifts from U.S. taxpayers.

In October 2023, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) began spending a $2.4 million grant from the State Department to fund energy projects in low-income nations.

In and of itself, helping less fortunate nations climb out of energy poverty is a good thing, but should it remain a priority for a government that has run up the largest debt in the history of money?

If this foreign aid is deemed a highest and best use of the money, then should the loot go to the radical climate alarmists at RMI who oppose all of the reliable energy options, including nuclear?

Similarly, in June 2023, RMI began work on a $5.1 million grant from the Department of Transportation, even though the radical nonprofit has opposed almost all the fuels used to power American transportation.

In October 2021, RMI received a $339,899 Department of Energy grant for “ESTIMATING CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS IN STATES COMMITTED TO MEDIUM- AND HEAVY-DUTY TRUCK ELECTRIFICATION.”

It seems unlikely RMI spent this money wisely because in the Great American EV charging station boondoggle of the early 2020s, almost nobody spent smartly. A $7.5 billion appropriation for EV charging stations in 2021 was one of the Biden administration’s first legislative accomplishments. By May 2024, Autoweek reported the program was “moving very, very slowly,” which was the kind way of saying “only eight chargers have been put in place.”

Imagine the justified outrage if the Department of Energy paid $7.5 billion to build eight gasoline pumps.

Similarly, in June 2024 Grid Alternatives began working on a $1.5 million Department of Energy grant to “UNLOCK EQUITY AT PUBLIC ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHARGING.”

In addition to opposing all forms of reliable energy—including nuclear—Grid Alternatives was a promoter of the Green New Deal. The neo-socialist plot for the American economy was so radical that even San Francisco Democrat and former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi derisively dismissed it as “the green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is.”

And that $1.5 million is a mere rounding error in the recent pile of federal loot that has been landing on Grid Alternatives. In May 2024 the nonprofit began receiving payments on a pair of solar energy grants from the Environmental Protection Agency that will collectively be worth more than $312 million.

Subsidizing Inefficient Energy

Grants to unreliable energy and electric vehicles that have flowed from American taxpayers during just the Biden administration are all government inefficiency that should be on the DOGE chopping block.

“A typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear facility in the United States needs a little more than 1 square mile to operate,” claims the Department of Energy, while “wind farms require 360 times more land area to produce the same amount of electricity and solar photovoltaic plants require 75 times more space.”

Similarly a 2021 report from Bloomberg News reports that a “200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 19 square miles” while a “natural gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.”

For these relatively trivial trickles of electricity, wind turbines and solar panels have been implicated in the mass killing of eagles, bats, other raptors, and even whales. Remember when there was an American environmental movement that actually cared about preserving the land, eagles, and whales?

The federal government’s EV waste is also linked to its mad fixation on weather-dependent energy. Despite tens of billions of federal subsidy dollars annually shoveled into environment-gobbling wind and solar schemes, those two sources combined still produce just 14 percent of total U.S. electricity. So if you’re driving an EV in America, then it is likely running on carbon-emitting natural gas (43.1 percent of U.S. electricity production in 2023) or coal (16.2 percent).

Carbon-free nuclear power plants produced 18.2 percent of U.S. electricity in 2023. But deployment of more of these has been artificially restricted for five decades—in large measure due to pressure from the same anti-energy groups that have recently received hundreds of millions in federal grants.

How’s THAT for government inefficiency?

Just the Beginning

There’s a lot more where that came from.

Federal spending for Fiscal Year 2024 was just less than $6.8 trillion or more than $80,000 spent per household of four. If it had been stand-alone nation, just the $1.8 trillion added to the American federal deficit in FY 2024 would have been one of the world’s 15 largest economies.

Yet inflation-adjusted federal spending in FY 2019 was less than $5.5 trillion. Merely limiting annual spending increases to no more than the rate of inflation for five years would have wiped out most of that $1.8 trillion FY 2024 deficit.

Cutting spending that has been larded on since then is the low-hanging fruit DOGE should be easy picking. Grants to anti-energy groups promoting EVs and weather-dependent energy should be just the beginning.