The Department of Energy (DOE) terminated funding for California’s hydrogen hub and more than 280 other clean-energy projects approved during the Biden administration for political reasons, the agency conceded this month in response to a lawsuit over the cuts, as first reported by the New York Times.
A group of six University of California faculty and other researchers filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against the Trump administration in June 2025 on behalf of all UC researchers whose previously approved agency grants were terminated. The complaint was amended in November 2025 to include the California hydrogen hub, formally known as the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems (ARCHES).
The agency stipulated in a letter filed July 15 that 624 of more than 2,300 grants were designated for termination as part of an agency review initiated in May 2025. In October 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the termination of 284 grants, including California’s ARCHES hub and the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub (PNWH2), which includes Washington, Oregon and Montana.
“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” according to the DOE stipulation. “DOE accepts that neither the inclusion of the ARCHES grant nor any other grants in the October notice tranche was based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”
The other 340 grants identified for potential termination in the DOE review were not subsequently terminated.
As we noted in The Contenders, renewables were the backbone of the ARCHES proposal (#1 in table below), which aimed to leverage California’s leadership in clean energy technology to produce hydrogen from renewable energy and biomass. Like its neighbor to the south, the PNWH2 (#7 in table) was planned to leverage the region’s abundant renewable resources to produce clean hydrogen via electrolysis.
