Hydrogen Hubs, Rail Tunnels, and Walkability: Winners & Losers in the Shutdown Cuts – CleanTechnica

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The Trump administration’s October 2025 decision to cancel $26 billion in clean energy and transportation infrastructure funding came as a surprise only in its breadth. The cuts were rolled out during a federal shutdown and framed by the administration as an act of fiscal prudence, even as they disrupted ongoing and fully vetted projects. The reasoning behind it followed a now-familiar pattern: target urban, coastal, and Democratic-voting states with cuts framed as fiscal discipline while quietly leaving fossil-fuel projects untouched.

As someone working on decarbonization projects in multiple jurisdictions, it is clear this decision will defer or destroy dozens of major projects the United States needs if it hopes to modernize its infrastructure and lower emissions. The damage will ripple through clean electricity deployment, public transit upgrades, and transmission and port infrastructure essential to scaling wind and solar. The only silver lining in this move is that many of the hydrogen-for-energy and hydrogen-for-transportation hubs that lost funding were unlikely to deliver real climate benefit in the first place. That outcome, however, appears to be entirely accidental.

The decision to freeze or cancel transportation infrastructure projects is a clear-cut case of self-inflicted harm. The Hudson River Tunnel, a $16 billion project connecting New Jersey and New York City, is not a climate luxury but a structural necessity. The existing 113-year-old tunnel is at risk of failure, and its replacement is a matter of economic survival for the region. Federal funding had already been committed through a Full Funding Grant Agreement, and the engineering and early procurement phases were underway. By freezing progress, the Department of Transportation has delayed a project that would have removed over 2 million tons of CO₂ annually through mode shift away from cars and planes. Equally harmful is the freeze on New York’s Second Avenue Subway Phase 2, a $7.7 billion extension bringing rail access to East Harlem. The project had been vetted for years, and 100,000 daily riders were projected to benefit. Emissions reductions would come from shifting thousands of daily car trips to electric rail, while also relieving congestion on Manhattan’s overstretched Lexington Avenue Line.

California’s high-speed rail project, though often a lightning rod for criticism, also saw $2.4 billion in planned federal support rescinded. With a projected cost between $89 billion and $128 billion for Phase 1, it is one of the largest public infrastructure projects in North America. The electrified train line would run from Los Angeles to San Francisco and be powered entirely by renewable energy. Estimated emissions reductions range from 600,000 to 3 million tons of CO₂ annually, primarily through modal shift from short-haul aviation and car travel. While the project has faced delays and cost overruns, cutting funding now will not solve those problems. It will only guarantee continued reliance on more polluting transportation modes, and the longer the delay, the higher the ultimate cost to both the climate and taxpayers.

The offshore wind sector was hit particularly hard. The Department of Transportation pulled $679 million in grants for twelve port infrastructure projects meant to support turbine manufacturing, staging, and installation. The Humboldt Bay Terminal in California lost $427 million in federal funding. The project was already under development and would have been the first dedicated offshore wind port on the U.S. West Coast. Salem, Massachusetts, lost $33 million for a similar purpose, while Staten Island and Baltimore each saw grants for staging terminals revoked.

These ports were essential for meeting state offshore wind goals, but are unsurprising with the current administrations ideologically driven and chilling attacks on the basics of contractual law. That level of build-out would have displaced roughly 86 million tons of CO₂ annually, based on current electricity grid emissions intensity. Without the port infrastructure to assemble and launch turbines, the build-out cannot proceed.

Smaller, lower-cost projects were also targeted, often with justifications that revealed the political nature of the cuts. A $20 million grant to redesign streets in Boston with protected bike lanes and EV charging was canceled on the grounds that EV chargers were too “urban-focused.” Albuquerque lost $11.5 million for a downtown rail-trail designed to promote walkability and low-carbon mobility. Connecticut saw a $5.7 million grant for a 44-mile greenway trail in the Naugatuck Valley pulled without warning. These projects were part of broader strategies to reduce vehicle miles traveled and promote safer, more energy-efficient transport. While their CO₂ reductions are harder to quantify, they represent essential components of urban decarbonization.

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of the October cuts is how directly they target jurisdictions that voted against Trump in the 2024 election. All sixteen states affected by the DOE rescissions had gone Democratic. New York, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois saw both transportation and energy projects slashed. In nearly every case, the administration’s stated rationale cited “equity-based scoring” or “overly woke criteria” in project selection.

That framing disregards the fact that every one of these projects had already passed rigorous competitive review, environmental assessments, and budgetary vetting. Reversing funding after awards have been made damages trust in federal processes and chills private investment. Companies that had planned to co-invest alongside federal funds may now walk away, increasing the financing burden on already stretched state and local governments.

Among the larger cuts was the cancellation of nearly $7.6 billion in Department of Energy funding that had already been awarded or conditionally committed to hydrogen hubs. California’s ARCHES Hydrogen Hub alone was awarded $1.2 billion in federal support to build out renewable hydrogen production for trucks, buses, and port equipment. While this hub would have created thousands of jobs, its primary goal—replacing diesel with hydrogen in transport—was unlikely to achieve cost or efficiency parity with direct electrification. Further, leaking hydrogen would have been endemic and with hydrogen’s high indirect global warming potential, climate benefits would have been been much lower than hydrogen proponents claimed.

The Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub, which had secured a $1 billion award to build green hydrogen capacity using hydropower and solar in Washington, Oregon, and Montana, was also cut. Together with three other regional hydrogen hubs in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Heartland states, the total canceled hydrogen funding exceeded $5 billion. These hubs were projected to reduce U.S. emissions by 25 million tons of CO₂ annually, according to the DOE’s own modeling, but most of that was based on optimistic displacement of fossil fuels in hard-to-electrify sectors. To be clear, the PNW hub had an industrial feedstock focus and that cut is a pity. The failure of the hydrogen hub program was baked into its structure: spread across too many states with too little focus, and often propping up legacy oil and gas infrastructure. The cuts, while politically motivated, likely spared the U.S. billions in low-impact spending.

The net result is a nationwide delay in the infrastructure needed for electrification and decarbonization. Transit, rail, offshore wind, and grid upgrades are not optional if the Blue states targeted intend to reduce emissions, modernize transport, and remain economically competitive. Most of the hydrogen hubs may have been a distraction, but pulling funding from the rest guarantees that much-needed industrial feedstock capacity for fertilizers and commercial explosives will not be built on time.

Bent Flyvbjerg’s work on megaprojects provides a useful lens for understanding what just happened. He has shown repeatedly that large infrastructure projects are exposed to long-tailed risks simply because they take so long to complete. The cost and schedule overruns that plague tunnels, subways, and transmission lines are only part of the story. When timelines stretch into decades, the projects also become vulnerable to shifting political winds. A change in government can rewrite priorities, rescind funding, or impose new constraints just as shovels are about to hit the ground. The October 2025 cuts are a clear example. Years of planning and commitments can evaporate overnight when political interests turn. Flyvbjerg’s warning is that without stable, bipartisan support and clear governance, megaprojects are at the mercy of forces far outside the control of engineers and project managers, and that uncertainty compounds both financial and climate risks.

US Blue states do not lack engineering talent, capital, or policy frameworks for decarbonization. What they do lack, repeatedly, is stable and rational federal governance of infrastructure investment. Projects worth tens of billions were paused, canceled, or thrown into uncertainty for reasons that have little to do with emissions, economics, or public benefit. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this was not about fiscal responsibility, but about political punishment. The tragedy is that what was cut is exactly what most jurisdictions are trying to build: fast rail, clean power, local transit, and grid capacity. These cuts have not ended the transition. They have only slowed it, at significant cost to those who will live with the consequences.