An “executive branch machinery that defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies” undercut the ex-president’s massive energy and infrastructure programs, a report by his former staffers details.
President Joe Biden’s agencies allowed bureaucracy, indecision and fear of repeating past mistakes to undermine their efforts to bankroll a historic green energy revolution, former administration officials wrote in a newly prepared autopsy of the ex-president’s energy agenda.
Memories of Solyndra, a solar manufacturer whose 2011 collapse stirred political headaches for the Obama administration, also fed the Biden officials’ risk-aversion, the report concluded.
The document, shared first with POLITICO, said that even as administration officials worked to commit hundreds of billions of dollars to build battery plants, solar farms, electric vehicle factories and other clean energy projects, they underestimated how aggressively the incoming Trump team would seek to undo their programs. The slow rollout also made it harder for Biden’s programs to withstand those attacks, they signaled.
“Three years after the first of [Biden-era] laws passed, only a handful of federally funded projects had broken ground,” the report said. “This meant the political theory animating the administration’s approach — that the economic development generated by clean energy projects and industries would create a durable bipartisan coalition — was never truly tested.”
That conclusion mirrors what POLITICO found last year in “Biden’s Billions,” a yearlong examination of the former president’s $1.6 trillion in energy, infrastructure, technology and pandemic-related spending initiatives, which reported that “the core of his domestic legacy stands unfinished … and imperiled as Donald Trump prepares to take office.”
Trump has since spent his first 10 months in the White House unraveling Biden’s attempt at a New Deal-sized industrial legacy — canceling grants and loans, freezing money in recipients’ bank accounts and otherwise rolling back major pieces of the former president’s bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act.
Now staffers, largely from Biden’s Energy Department, are providing lessons learned in the new report.
Biden’s legislative ambition “was undercut by an executive branch machinery that defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies rather than speed, outcomes, and clear direction,” the former officials wrote.
Interviewees “almost unanimously felt” that overall implementation did not live up to the ambition of the laws, the report said. It drew on interviews with 83 political and career staff who sat at the heart of implementation, with a primary focus on offices at the Energy Department. The interviews were conducted between February and August.
“If we get another bite at the apple in the future at clean energy industrial policy, how are we going to do it differently next time?” asked Alan Propp, a report author who served in DOE’s Loan Programs Office under Biden.
“Making sure that we’re able to pair the fresh lessons from implementation with the need of the moment just felt like a really urgent task,” he said.
As POLITICO detailed last year, the Biden administration’s implementation of its funding programs was sluggish. By last December, a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast had created just 47 charging stations — a point Trump lampooned endlessly in his campaign rallies. A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service had yet to connect a single household.
Officials insisted at the time that they were working with haste and pointed to data detailing their far-reaching initial selection of recipients, but often failed to offer any government-wide totals of how much money had been formally awarded or actually used by recipients. They also expressed confidence that their handiwork would endure, pointing to laws that would limit the new administration’s ability to reverse their spending decisions.
The Biden administration sought to spur a clean energy industrial revolution using tax credits, loans and grants from the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Hundreds of new and expanded manufacturing facilities and energy projects were announced in response — largely in GOP-held districts across the country.
But the funding’s rollout suffered because of persistent challenges and delays, such as complex award cycles and processes, “persistent bias” against perceived risk-taking and programs that “tried to meet too many goals at once,” according to the report.
“DOE tried to solve structural inequality via grid infrastructure, which was an unrealistic goal,” the report quoted one staffer as saying.
Besides Propp, the report’s other authors — Ramsey Fahs and Louise White — worked at the LPO, Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of Technology Transitions.
“There was very often an overestimation of the risk that we could address by doing more diligence and an underestimation of the risk of inaction and of moving the deal forward,” said Propp. “The risk of inaction is what we’re seeing right now with cancellations and rollbacks and job losses.”
Recipients of the bipartisan infrastructure law funding have spent up to $228 billion, or 27 percent of the total that Congress made available under the law, according to a POLITICO analysis of federal spending data.
That’s up from $86 billion in spending under the infrastructure law in May 2024, when most voters said in a POLITICO-Morning Consult poll that they had seen zero or only minor benefits from the Biden administration’s infrastructure agenda.
The Biden administration left office having obligated at least $97 billion in IRA grant funding and committed a separate $108 billion in Energy Department loans, according to the report.
The report detailed six core themes that emerged in interviews as primary challenge areas — clear deployment goals, prioritization, speedy decision-making, risk management, overly lengthy award processes and personnel management.
White said any administration will need to balance competing priorities, which leads to tensions inside the government.
“But I think one of the opportunities is to make sure that not every program has to hit all of those priorities, which I think was one of the big challenges that Energy ran into — that every program needed to address everything,” she said.
The report also said there were too many senior-level “principals” and too few “deciders” involved in the process, as well as “a persistent bias for what was perceived as the least risky path available in each situation.”
That was shaped in part by the legacy of the bankruptcy of the Solyndra solar manufacturer during the Obama era.
“In our interviews, I rarely brought up Solyndra, and almost everyone brought up Solyndra,” Propp said.
Solyndra collapsed into bankruptcy despite receiving a $535 million government loan guarantee — a failure that Republicans trumpeted to portray the green spending in the 2009 stimulus as a disaster despite the overall success of the program’s renewable stimulus. (Another beneficiary of the same loan program was a then-fledgling electric car company named Tesla.)
The report laid out a series of recommendations to streamline agency processes and highlighted steps implemented under the Biden administration that were helpful positives to build upon, like new decision-making structures at the loan office or the process for transmission projects at the Grid Deployment Office. It also made recommendations for lawmakers.
All of which underscored a stark lesson: Speed of implementation is imperative.
“I think it will be a very central part of any future plans to say, ‘What can be done within one term?’ And done as in, a real thing out built in the world, not a commitment on a piece of paper,” Fahs said.
Trump — who entered his second term on a promise to undo much of Biden’s energy actions — quickly moved to freeze and review his predecessor’s actions in January.
Republicans repealed key tax credits, canceled loan commitments and rescinded grant funding. Some of those efforts have been challenged in the courts. Elsewhere, private sector companies have pulled back plans.
“By the end of the [Biden] administration, many programs were starting to hit their stride. But with so much progress undone under the new Trump administration,” the report said, interviewees “voiced disappointment that their work has proven less durable than they expected.”
Conversations with staff suggested a future administration “could move significantly faster to support real-world progress if strong preparation and prework is started today,” the report said. And it highlighted an unlikely source — Project 2025 — as a recent example of such preparatory work.
“[T]he next administration must come armed not only with broad aspirations, but also with the detailed plans required to implement them,” the report concluded.