Funding Status: Infrastructure Investment and Jobs and Inflation Reduction Acts at the Departments of Agriculture and Energy

Filed 1h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

The Path of the Goblin King

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Frans Hals · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

USDA and the Department of Energy received $134 billion combined from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act for fiscal years 2022-2025, funding wildfire reduction, rural power, and clean energy projects. Following a January 2025 presidential directive to review projects for alignment with administration priorities, DOE reported continuing 381 awards worth $19.6 billion and cancelling 155 worth $9.1 billion.

USDA, by contrast, completed its review by June 2025 and terminated 34 contracts totaling $67 million, but GAO found the agency's data too unreliable to determine the status of all reviewed awards. USDA officials could not specify which awards were approved to continue, modified, or additionally cancelled as a result of the process.

The review specifically screened for racial, ethnic, and gender preferences and climate or environmental justice initiatives, per agency officials and documentation cited by GAO.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

DOE at least kept a ledger of what it killed and what it spared, which is the bare minimum you'd expect from anybody handling nine billion dollars of cancellations. USDA ran the same ideological gauntlet over the same money and came out the other side unable to say what happened to most of it. That's not a review, that's a filing cabinet that got knocked over and never picked back up.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: The Path of the Goblin King · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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