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The Trump administration’s cuts to the clean energy industry have led to 20,000 job losses in the US and threatened almost $70bn in project investments, according to a climate advocacy group.
Climate Power warned that almost 100 projects had been cancelled, delayed or threatened since the November presidential election, potentially reversing gains in manufacturing employment under the Biden administration.
A further 40,000 clean energy jobs are under threat, as they are attached to paused projects or linked to companies that were previously awarded federal grants or loans that the Trump administration now wants to cut.
The realised and potential job losses are spread across the solar, wind, hydrogen, critical minerals and battery manufacturing industries — with the already cancelled or threatened projects representing more than $71.24bn of investment. Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia are among the states facing the biggest impact from potential job losses.
Democrats seized on the new figures, with Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, saying they were part of a “haemorrhaging” of clean energy jobs and “catastrophic” for growth.
The US Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The data arrives amid growing concern about a weakening US economy, which contracted over the first quarter due mainly to the impact of tariffs.
Climate Power helped fund a $55mn ad campaign in swing states in support of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris leading up to the November election. The majority of clean energy projects announced since the former president Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 are located in Republican congressional districts, worth just under $200bn.
Most clean energy projects are funded by IRA tax credits, and Republicans are debating whether to cut them from the budget.
Since President Donald Trump’s second term began in January, the Department of the Interior has ordered the cancellation of high-profile projects such as Empire Wind, leading to the loss of 1,000 jobs, issued a series of executive orders clawing back clean energy loans distributed under the IRA and has frozen permitting for projects on federal land.
In February, Kore Power abandoned plans for a $1bn battery plant in Buckeye, Arizona’s second-largest city by area, for which it secured a $850mn loan from the Department of Energy in 2023.
In the first quarter of 2025, clean energy job creation also declined for the first quarter since the summer of 2022, with jobs falling from 406,000 at the end of 2024 to 399,000 by the end March.
Meanwhile, factory construction investment has fallen from more than $20bn to $18bn between the end of last year and February.
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Earlier this month Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research published research showing six projects $6.9bn of investment had been cancelled since January.
Companies were already slowing down plans for clean energy investments prior to Trump’s election, due to overproduction in China, market price collapses and slowing demand for electric vehicles. In August, the Financial Times reported that 40 per cent of clean tech manufacturing projects supported by the IRA had been delayed, including some cited in Climate Power’s report.
Additional reporting by Jamie Smyth and Amanda Chu in New York
Climate Capital
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