Authored by Alan Cassels via The Brownstone Institute,

Well, well, look here. In its June 2026 update the venerated OED or Oxford English Dictionary, finally added the ‘new’ word, fearmonging. It explains fearmongering as “the action or an act of spreading fear or alarm among the public, esp. by exaggerating the dangers associated with a political, social, or economic issue; alarmism.”

Thank goodness, the dictionary has caught up to our society’s most pernicious habit; that is, using fear to sell anything. Especially when it comes to our health.

Here we find the most destructive aspect of fearmongering, ie: trying to convince normal, healthy people we are “abnormal” or “sick,” and fundamentally changing the way we think about ourselves. The marketing of fear often drives people to their doctors, and to the inevitable prescription pad, with predictable results: people getting unnecessary, sometimes harmful drugs for natural, normal phases of life.

The grift goes wide and deep. Many influencers and physician-educators have financial ties through sponsored content or brand partnerships, sometimes pushing lines of supplements, telehealth services, books, or their appearances on the speaking circuit. Sadly, information about who funds them to say what they say is not always straightforward and the top social media posts about certain drugs or therapies often obscure their potential conflicts of interest (e.g., selling related products/services).

We know that many of these campaigns are backed by medical specialists or social media influencers, wedded to their theories and pushing whatever to cash in on all the fear. Those campaigns are about ‘moving product’ by subtly convincing millions of healthy people that their bodies are broken, dysfunctional, deficient, and decaying. I’ve written these words before but they are worth repeating: fearmongering is an assault on our collective soul and the theft of wellness for which we all pay a high price.

Full-On Menopause Mongering

We can see fearmongering everywhere, but the most brazen current example is the full-frontal assault on menopause. If you’ve read a newspaper or scrolled through social media lately you might be asking yourself: Why the heck is everyone getting worked up about menopause? Are hot flashes taking over the planet? Are women really as angry as the media portrays them to be? And the drugs: who do you believe about whether the drugs will help or harm you?

These are good questions, focusing on a condition that every woman – our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on – went through, back to the dawn of time. The fearmongering today bypasses the fact that most women who arrive at the end of their periods get through this phase without serious discomfort or suffering. For some, it’s a big “meh.” Others might be helped by what’s on offer but they have to swim through a sea of corporate-sponsored fearmongering messages to get there.

The key theme in most of the media stories is that women’s needs are unmet, many of them are deeply suffering and they all need to be considering MHT (Menopausal Hormone Therapy) in order to live their best lives. By the way, MHT is the new way hormones are branded, which used to be called HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Same stuff, different wrapping, carrying less baggage of the HRT horrors of the past.

In the mainstream media you’ll find oodles of journalists in love with a story like this, featuring female suffering, emancipation, and empowerment in one tight little bundle with enough frilly gift wrapping to hide pharma’s fingerprints. The dangers of hormones haven’t changed, only the marketing of those dangers has.

This might have been kicked off by a story, “Women Have Been Misled About Menopause” in the New York Times Magazine, (Feb 1, 2023) a long-form essay which barely camouflages a shameless bit of salesmanship, setting the tone for so many other media outlets to follow. It aims to correct those who are still being ‘misled’ by outdated ideas about the dangers of hormone therapy, mainly breast cancer, also asserting that there are more “updated” interpretations of the alleged dangers of these drugs.

A newer New York Times article from last month (June 15, 2026) claims “Millions of Women are Left Out of Menopause’s Moment” and further cements the hormone marketing by telling the sorry tale of those women who are totally FOMO because they are at a higher risk of breast cancer and therefore shouldn’t dip their toes into the hormone pool.

Menopause mongering got a huge bump a while back when the US FDA reversed a 20-year-old black box warning of the dangers of hormone therapy and many media outlets (NPR, Slate, Nature,) jumped on the bandwagon and leapt into covering the issues related to the removal of black-box warnings on HRT. Note to file: Black boxes are the most serious warnings applied to approved pharmaceuticals. The manufacturers fight like hell not to get a black box on their products, and when there is one there, they fight like hell to have it removed, regardless of whether their arguments are warranted. In this case, they won.

The official FDA/HHS announcement was titled: “HHS Advances Women’s Health, Removes Misleading FDA Warnings on Hormone Replacement Therapy.”

Pure unadulterated marketing. The science behind why those black box warnings of blood clots, cancers, and strokes didn’t change, so why remove the black box? Yet here you have a senior FDA official saying: “The removal of the black box warning, based on the best science and data, is an incredible step forward to empower millions of women to live longer, healthier lives.”

You can read about how disempowering it is to bamboozle women about the dangers of hormones in my last Brownstone article on this issue, where I report that the sudden stopping of hormone replacement therapy 20 years ago resulted in the biggest drop in breast cancer rates in the US ever.

But. But. But….Didn’t you hear that there is a huge “unmet need” that has to be fulfilled? That essentially is the thrust of the media’s take over the last two years on this very topic.

A sample of this includes Nature’s January 2025 article: “The new science of menopause: these emerging therapies could change women’s health” and Slate’s November 2025 Article “How Did Perimenopause Get So Popular?” This article made lots of hay out of the little sister of menopause, “perimenopause” which cranks up the fearmongering while aiming it at younger and younger women. In the words of the marketers (and Kramer from Seinfeld), you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. And there’s nothing better to seed a market than to tell younger and younger cohorts of women what kind of special hell will await them when their periods are over. That’ll get them positively tripping over each other to get to their doctors for their hormone prescriptions.

One of the brighter stars among the media stories of menopause was a piece this January in STAT News “How the perimenopause movement is hurting women,” which is, as far as I can tell, one of the only stories bothering to delve into the real harms of hormone therapy. Today women are being more and more exposed to promotional messages and downplaying the harm of a product we know increases risks of breast cancer, regardless of patients’ age or the formulation.

Added to this collection are pieces in Time, Forbes, Vogue, The Atlantic, focusing on the “Menopause Industry Boom” and the way celebrities are onboard with selling the idea of menopause as a “wellness opportunity” rather than just a medical event.

Here you see fear being sold in almost every conceivable space in the world of menopause. There is the fear of missing out, the fear of the drugs, the fear of the suffering, and the fear of the alternatives. There is the fear that doctors won’t take a woman’s hot flashes and night sweats seriously, there is the fear of consequences in the workplace and women fearing career discrimination because of what menopause is doing to them, and there is the fear of their bodies not being attractive or sexual in a way they are used to. Fear everywhere.

Women might feel that they are being betrayed by their ovaries, while also being shoveled hefty amounts of psychology, and “wellness” products including the pills, creams, and pricey interventions like it’s the end of femininity.

There is a price tag to all of this, not just in the vertigo women might feel in the menopause marketplace, but in what it might cost them. Estimates are that the global menopause market is worth around $16-18 billion per year, but that is projected to grow to $24+ billion by 2030-2033. Suffice to say there is a lot of grift to be found in the medicalizing and medicating of menopause.

Pharma’s influence is pernicious and ubiquitous, even if it doesn’t seem that obvious to the casual observer. Drug companies have their hands in medical societies, research organizations, and educational/ marketing campaigns that shape narratives. Many of us would assert that the current pro-HRT renaissance (emphasizing a hormone’s benefits while downplaying the known and serious harms) is partly driven by industry-friendly messaging, even if direct-to-consumer ads for hormones are rare.

Except for patented alternatives. Here’s the fearmongering again, this time to subtly promote “non-hormonal” menopausal drugs. On February 11, 2024, Astella’s newly approved menopausal drug, Veozah was advertised on the biggest billboard in the world, at Super Bowl LVIII. Astellas aired a 60-second commercial for Veozah just before kickoff, featuring a tagline “Fewer Hot Flashes, More Not Flashes.”

Pushing Veozah (fezolinetant) as a non-hormonal treatment might seem clever, but it acts to further medicalize hot flashes, which for many women are trivial and are often dealt with quite effectively without drugs. The worrisome side effect profile of Veozah would make one think twice about this medication costing between $500 to $700 a month. In a year-long trial, the most common adverse reactions were pain, diarrhea, insomnia, back pain, and hot flashes. Go figure. Drug-induced liver injury is the real worry, and the elevation in liver enzymes means that women need to have baseline liver tests repeated at 3, 6, and 9 months. All this for some mild symptom relief. Hope the risk of liver failure was worth it.

Everyone’s Talking Empowerment (But Nobody’s Doing It)

Thankfully we no longer refer to menopause as an “estrogen deficiency disease,” a corporate-sponsored tagline if there ever was one. But we still have a long way to go.

Much of the commentary and media reports today focus on how to deal with the symptoms of menopause, which assert that doctors are basically missing in action when it comes to menopause, and that patients need, more than anything, “empowerment.”

What an old-fashioned thought that is: you mean women should ignore all the junk science, pharma marketing, and menopausal grifters out there and just follow their own intuition? Sounds like what Grandma would have done.

There are no glib and easy answers to all the menopausal marketing surrounding us, but perhaps the least offensive summary I’ve seen was a March 2024 article published in the medical journal, the Lancet, called “An empowerment model for managing menopause.”

While obnoxiously heavy on the “hormonal remake” theme, there are some key points worth noting. Particularly, menopause isn’t a disease; it’s a life phase for women who live long enough. The symptoms often come in miserable bundles – hot flashes, ruined sleep, low mood. Patients face it and doctors have to deal with it and they should do so beyond the default reflex which is a script for hormones and a pamphlet.

While no one can argue against respecting the clichés of “evidence-based” options and “shared decision-making,” we can’t forget that “evidence-based” often means whatever specialists push and what’s easiest to prescribe. In this case, hormones, or MHT as they’ve rebranded it. For those who say menopause is a normal life stage rather than a pharmaceutical marketing opportunity, the menopause salespeople and other grifters are singing loudly, “Don’t be Cruel.”

The Lancet, similar to most vocal menopause specialists, insists that MHT is the only thing that fixes both hot flashes and genitourinary symptoms (while providing some small level of reduced fractures). No doubt the pills are convenient, especially for the industries and guidelines which favor a one-stop pill solution.

At the end of the day if “true empowerment” is possible, the experience of menopause for many women could be better. They don’t need more pills or lotions, though some may be helped by these. They need good information, respect, and above all, agency.

Qualitative work done in the UK shows menopause is “simultaneously normal, devastating, identity-shifting, and liberating,” which is to say, all over the map. Something this complex cannot be solved with clinical one-liners and fancy treatment algorithms. At the same time misinforming women as to the actual benefits and long-term harms of hormones is not cool, especially when that advice is delivered with a big dose of white-coated confidence, amnesia, and hubris.

The Lancet article manages to get to the heart of the issue: helping women manage symptoms is important, but medicalizing every aspect of menopause can be downright harmful.

Thankfully the Lancet does give a shout-out to a practical way for women to regain the kind of agency many of them want: CBT or cognitive behavioural therapy has shown some level of benefit. It reports that “for symptom clusters such as hot flashes, disturbed sleep, and depressed mood, RCTs show that CBT is effective.”

How? Well, this makes me recall the work of the philosopher Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. His main message is that although you can’t always change your circumstances, you can choose your attitude toward them. That’s a helpful perspective to adopt when facing many of life’s challenges. If CBT helps women learn about their symptoms, accept them, and help them develop ways to cope with them, that might go a lot further than the flotsam washing in on a tidal wave of fearmongering.

Back to Frankl for a second. He wrote that finding meaning in life is the primary human motivational force. The ability to find meaning through work, love, and suffering could always be seen as a way forward. Many women seeking some kind of help for this particular transition in their lives have both time and options on their hands. They can, if they choose, go forward and demand to be taken seriously, without succumbing to the sharp end of the menopausal marketing machine.

Let’s sing an ode to menopause, wrapped up in a little rhyme.
Or hum a wistful song for wombs that’ve clearly done their time.
Let’s make a plea for all life’s stages, as all things must finally pass,
And let’s expose the grifters’ motives, with a bit of snarky sass.

Let’s not forget the lying, their fearmongering shrill notes,
Let’s ask the specialists why we should trust their clean white coats.
Let’s put the lie to cringy brags of pharma’s innovative growth,
Let’s look at how we trampled the sacred Hippocratic oath.

Let’s not forget the central thing, the one essential theme,
That flies far further than the mongers’ wicked meme.
That within a single woman her fate is hers and hers alone.
And she needs freedom’s will to act on what is felt and known.

Alan Cassels is a Brownstone Fellow and a drug policy researcher and author who has written extensively about disease mongering. He is the author of four books, including The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters.

Taco Bell is betting a buck can buy back your love.

The fast-food giant rolled out $1 lettuce-free enchiritos – “for the ones who’ve been riding with us,” as the company put it – a peace offering to customers who bolted after a cyclospora outbreak was traced to lettuce served at its restaurants, the New York Post reports. The enchiritos normally run $4.29. Regular nacho fries, usually $2.89, also went to a dollar for orders placed through the company’s app.

The deal ran for one day.

The chain, never one to skip a chance at cheeky marketing, hyped it on social media alongside gushing customer testimonials. The dollar deal is “just to show how much we appreciate you,” the company cooed on its website.

The promotion arrived the day after CEO Sean Tresvant went on LinkedIn to make a rather different kind of appeal. “We aren’t entitled to your loyalty,” he wrote Tuesday. “We earn it one meal at a time.” He pledged to “be transparent about what we know and what we are doing next.” Twenty-four hours later, the company earned it at 77% off.

The Numbers Behind The Discount

Behind the warm and fuzzy promo is a brand in serious trouble.

Foot traffic at Taco Bell’s U.S. restaurants fell 20% below its daily average for the year on July 16, according to nationwide data from Placer.ai cited by CNN – before federal officials had said anything publicly. On July 17, when investigators named the chain as part of the probe, it dropped nearly 31%. The next day it was down 30%.

The damage is almost entirely Taco Bell’s. Fast-casual and quick-service restaurants as a whole declined just 1.1% and 1.9% respectively on July 17. Chipotle told CNN it is following the investigation closely and does not believe its own sourcing is involved. Shares of parent company Yum! Brands are down roughly 9% from a week ago.

Polling by Morning Consult found the share of diners saying they trust the brand “not much” or “not at all” climbing after the news broke. For a chain that has spent years as the best performer in Yum’s portfolio, that is the expensive part – foot traffic returns when the news cycle moves on, and trust does not.

To its credit, Taco Bell moved before it had to. The company pulled all affected Taylor Farms lettuce from its restaurants, with some locations acting before public-health authorities identified the supplier at all.

What The Parasite Actually Does

The bug in question, Cyclospora cayetanensis, is a microscopic parasite that spreads through contaminated fresh produce and unleashes days of misery: severe watery diarrhea, cramps, vomiting, nausea, fatigue and fever.

Just ask Cristy Cooper, who was laid up in a hospital bed after getting sick on June 25.

“This is worse than any flu I have ever gotten. It is just so miserable,” she told the Post. “I am worn out from it. I really am.”

How Much Of This Is Actually Taco Bell’s

Less than the headlines suggest, and that distinction matters.

The outbreak investigators traced to iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations covers five states – Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia – and roughly 1,644 reported illnesses.

The national picture is far larger and not one outbreak. The CDC has logged 4,173 lab-confirmed infections since May 1 plus more than 7,400 unconfirmed cases still under review, across 41 states, with 308 hospitalized. Michigan leads in case counts, with Ohio close behind. The agency says it is investigating multiple separate clusters, of which the lettuce outbreak is one, and no source has been established for the rest. Cyclosporiasis cases appear every summer. The CDC’s season runs through August 31.

The CDC also excludes “probable” cases from its official tally, which is one reason its numbers lag some states’ counts.

The Test That Wasn’t

The outbreak drama took a messier turn over the weekend, when the FDA acknowledged that a test appearing to link the outbreak to supplier Taylor Farms was a false positive – and that the batch in question was not even part of the current recall.

Taylor Farms claimed the feds “apologized,” a characterization FDA officials flatly rejected while continuing to point at the Mexican supplier as the likely culprit. The agency says there remains “overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall.” Taylor Farms has recalled product distributed to 27 states.

Which leaves a peculiar standoff: a recall with no positive laboratory test behind it, a supplier disputing the terms of its own vindication, and a restaurant chain absorbing the reputational cost of an outbreak most of which has not been traced to anyone. For one day, that cost was priced at three dollars and twenty-nine cents.

Amid the broader debate over artificial intelligence’s economic disruptions, the healthcare sector is quietly demonstrating some of the technology’s most concrete applications. Rather than the job losses feared in other industries, hospitals report AI augmenting physicians, streamlining routine tasks and accelerating innovation in ways that could improve outcomes while controlling costs.

At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, roughly 150 AI models are now in use. A tool called Record Time helps internists distill hundreds of pages of external medical records into searchable summaries, saving five to 30 minutes per patient, according to CNN.

“AI can step in and do a lot of the tedious work that very specialized doctors or medical professionals do to speed up that process – get to more accurate diagnoses, faster so you can treat more people,” Jason Droege, CEO of Scale AI, said.

Mayo is also testing AI for early pancreatic-cancer detection, potentially years ahead of conventional diagnosis, and for identifying atrial-fibrillation risks that could prevent strokes. The clinic partners with Microsoft and other firms to train models on its vast trove of patient data.

Radiology, once predicted to be AI’s first casualty, tells a similar story of augmentation rather than obsolescence – though the most-cited evidence comes from an interested party. A report from Build American AI – a nonprofit advocacy arm of Leading the Future, the $100 million pro-AI super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI executives – finds the U.S. radiologist workforce in Medicare-affiliated practices grew 17.3% between 2014 and 2023. At Mayo itself, the group says, the number of radiologists expanded 55% since 2016. The organization does not disclose its donors and lobbies for federal preemption of state AI rules, so the figures warrant independent checking against Medicare provider data.

Utah recently became the first state to allow an AI system from Doctronic to renew prescriptions for chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. In the pilot’s first five months, the AI recommended approval in 72% of cases, with physicians concurring 91% of the time; it escalated the rest when complications appeared, Forbes reports. The program targets established medications, maintains human oversight and bars controlled substances.

Tampa General Hospital estimates that an AI-enabled sepsis-detection system it built with Palantir has helped save 886 lives since August 2022, cutting early sepsis deaths by 68%. The figure is the hospital’s own assessment of a system developed with a commercial partner.

In drug development, AI’s impact may prove most transformative. A TD Cowen survey of biopharma leaders found executives expect the technology to compress preclinical costs and timelines by as much as 70%, powering in-silico modeling that simulates thousands of experiments rapidly, Axios reports. Respondents expect new drug programs to expand more than 10% in the coming years.

Yet inside the very institutions championing AI, opposition is already brewing.

Mayo Clinic’s former Director of Research Operations Traci Tamiko Eto sued the hospital earlier this month, alleging she was retaliated against for raising privacy and oversight concerns around some Mayo AI systems. Mayo Clinic spokesperson Andrea Kalmanovitz said the hospital doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation but underscored that it is “committed to the responsible development and deployment of AI, with privacy, security, transparency and compliance embedded throughout our processes.”

“Our research and clinical innovation are conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and we remain steadfast in upholding the trust patients place in us and respecting their privacy,” Kalmanovitz said in a statement.

A stomach parasite spread by feces on fresh produce has now sickened people in 41 states, federal health officials said – five days after the FDA pulled back the only lab test linking the outbreak to the lettuce it recalled.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said July 21 it has confirmed 4,173 domestic cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1 and is tracking more than 7,400 additional reported cases that labs have not yet confirmed. Many of those came from Michigan and Ohio. The agency has moved to weekly surveillance updates this year because of the increase over the same period in 2025.

The confirmed total is nearly four times the 1,180 cases the agency recorded during all of last season.

Forty-one states have reported cases, up from 34 four days earlier. Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Wyoming reported their first cases of the summer this week.

Those cases are not all one outbreak. The CDC says it is investigating multiple separate clusters this summer. The lettuce investigation is one of them, and it covers five states.

Of the confirmed patients nationally, 308 have been hospitalized and none have died. They ranged in age from 2 to 95. Fifty-six percent were female, and the median date of illness onset was June 26.

Taylor Farms, a California-based supplier, recalled iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico on July 17 after investigators tied it to illnesses in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. The lettuce was served at some Taco Bell locations. That cluster accounts for 1,644 reported illnesses and 94 hospitalizations.

Lettuce See About That

Two days after the recall, the FDA said a lettuce sample it had announced as testing positive for the parasite had not actually tested positive.

“During a quality check by our laboratory personnel, we did detect the false positive, and we did issue a correction,” Donald Prater, the agency’s acting deputy commissioner for food, told reporters on a call.

Prater said the recall stands.

“It’s important to note that the re-evaluation of the sample does not alter the data supporting the outbreak advisory that prompted the current voluntary recall,” he said. “FDA’s traceback investigation and the outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms location in central Mexico.”

The case against the lettuce now rests on shipping records and patient interviews. The CDC says 90 percent of the patients it interviewed in the five-state cluster reported eating iceberg lettuce. No sample of the recalled product has tested positive for the parasite.

That last point is less damning than it sounds. Cyclospora is among the hardest foodborne pathogens to catch in a sample. It cannot be grown in a laboratory – the parasite needs a human host to reproduce – so investigators cannot culture a suspected find to confirm it. It occurs in very small numbers, meaning samples must be enormous to detect anything. Its oocysts lodge in surface crevices that resist washing. Positive product samples are rare in Cyclospora investigations even when the source is eventually established.

Taylor Farms said July 20 that no Taylor Farms-branded products are involved in the recall, that it will not source iceberg lettuce from central Mexico “for the remainder of the growing season,” and that it is working with health officials.

State health departments are reporting far higher numbers than the CDC. Michigan counted 6,571 cases and 102 hospitalizations as of Monday. The Toledo-Lucas County Health Department in Ohio counted 2,149. The CDC does not include probable cases in its updates; many states do.

The federal count is also climbing on both sides of the ledger. A week ago the agency listed 1,645 confirmed cases and more than 5,100 awaiting analysis. The confirmed number rose by about 2,500. The unconfirmed number rose by about 2,300.

Cyclosporiasis symptoms include watery diarrhea, cramping, loss of appetite and fatigue. Symptoms typically begin about a week after exposure. The illness is treated with antibiotics.

Cases appear every summer. The CDC’s season runs through August 31.

Federal investigators have pulled a product off the shelves that no laboratory test has implicated, on the strength of shipping records and what sick people remember eating. With this parasite that may be the only call available. It also means that when the season closes on August 31, the case against the lettuce will rest roughly where it rests today – and the thousands of cases outside those five states will still be looking for a source.

A shitty situation all around…

Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations,

For much of its five-decade history, the Colorado Energy Office was a small department with a handful of employees who supported practical, cost-saving energy conservation measures. From 2010 to 2022, records show, the office received an average of $7 million per year from the U.S. Department of Energy.

All that changed after the Biden administration and Congress approved hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending to provide “a more equitable, low-carbon, and clean energy economy.” In fiscal year 2024, Colorado’s state energy office was slated to receive $157.5 million from the energy department, along with another $156 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Biden team’s defeat in the 2024 election didn’t stop the gusher, either, as an additional $60 million in funding was allocated after voters elected Trump and his promise to halt the spending.

A RealClearInvestigations search of government data shows that the Colorado Energy Office was just one of many agencies and groups across the country that received exponential increases in federal grants during Biden’s last two years as part of the unprecedented attempt to refashion federal agencies into the finance engines that would transform the U.S. energy sector to a renewable, Net Zero future.

The Treasury Department’s database suggests that after Congress passed the unprecedented funding to fight climate change, it looked for outfits that could disperse that money at the state and local level. In response, it turned to many organizations in the public and private sector with no track record for handling such vast sums, as well as state energy offices and agencies.

“Biden-era climate policy sometimes prioritized sending money out the door first, and worrying about logistics and oversight second,” said Jeremy Portnoy, an investigator with OpenTheBooks who seeks to make all government spending public. “Money went to groups that were receiving grants larger than they had the capability to manage.”

Although they represent only a sliver of Biden-era spending on green energy, the sudden promise of $9.5 billion in awards to state and county energy programs beginning in FY2024 and the Trump administration efforts to claw back some of that money highlight how shifts in White House policies can make long-term planning hard, especially regarding partisan policy issues.

In response to Trump’s efforts to halt much of the spending, a coalition of 13 Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in February seeking to have all the approved grant money dispensed. They argued the Trump administration unfairly targeted states controlled by Democrats, and that without the money those states’ “ambitious climate goals” may not be reached.

“Since the first day of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, his Administration set out to reverse and undermine the historic energy and infrastructure funding measures enacted by Congress in the preceding years,” according to the lawsuit. “Its true purpose was to give the Administration thin bureaucratic cover to eliminate congressionally established energy and infrastructure programs and rescind their funding, for no other reason than a fundamental disagreement with the programs’ policy underpinnings.”

The legal challenges have scored some successes; last month the Energy Department agreed to reinstate 11 grants, although the largest of them remain in limbo.

Three Huge Beneficiaries

While most states received some portion of the climate splurge, RCI’s analysis focused on three of the biggest beneficiaries: Colorado, California, and New York, which were poised to receive more than $1 billion.

Like the Colorado Energy Office, the New York Energy Research and Development Institute and the California Energy Commission were started as energy conservation initiatives in the 1970s when the U.S. was reeling from the oil embargo shock, and the economy’s blood seemed dependent on the wills of foreign actors. In more recent decades, all three have also focused on renewable energy, with a special emphasis on social justice equity. Today, the New York institute has nearly 500 employees with an average salary of $127,220, while the California Commission enjoys regulatory powers over siting energy plants and sets state energy policies.

In addition to state funding and, in New York and California, money from ratepayers, these three state agencies routinely received federal grants for relatively small amounts, according to the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov.

But then Biden’s Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act and his Inflation Reduction Act kicked in, and the Energy Department began to approve enormous sums for the state agencies. The grant bonanza went on for roughly 18 months beginning in 2023 and was capped by a post-election frenzy in December 2024 and January 2025, records show. Suddenly, the three Democratic state agencies were receiving grants 10 or more times bigger than anything they had gotten previously.

An RCI review of the FY2024 data showed both the unprecedented size of the grants and the rapidity with which they were greenlit:

• The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority got an average of $5.2 million a year in Energy Department grants from 2015 to 2021. In 2024, however, it was slated to receive $335.38 million. Even after Trump’s 2024 election, $30 million was approved in three grants.
• The Colorado Energy Office averaged $6.7 million from 2015 to 2021. Its 2024 grant haul was on top of almost $60 million in fiscal year 2023, and post-2024 election grants to the office were for nearly another $60 million.
• The California Energy Commission averaged $3.1 million for the seven years between 2015 and 2021, a figure that increased by more than a hundred-fold in 2024. After the 2024 election, another $630.5 million grant was approved, one of seven post-election grants.

And the grants came in rapid procession, records show. In California’s case, there were four grants totaling $1.4 billion in the last six months of the 2024 calendar year, while the Energy Department and the EPA combined to greenlight more than $400 million in July and August of that year.

The Treasury Department has rarely disbursed these grants in full. Unlocking that money is the main goal of a February lawsuit brought by the attorneys general. And, as RCI previously reported, totals on usaspending.gov do not always match those from other agencies, reflecting the complexity and scale of federal spending.

But the extraordinary amounts and compressed timeline reflect a blizzard of approved spending that the inspectors general of the respective federal agencies warned would make effective oversight of the money nearly impossible.

Nebulous & Questionable

The grants were designed to pay for tasks such as improving the resilience of the grid in the face of disasters or the integration of renewable energy into the grid, or for reducing methane emissions. Yet another purpose was for programs such as home weatherization, a federal operation dogged by allegations of fraud and shoddy work, as RCI reported in 2022.

Some of the biggest grants were for nebulous-sounding work. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act was the source of funding “to provide initial guidance for the planning, administration or technical assistance for future distributions of formula awards through the home energy rebate programs.”

Such “initial guidance” would not come cheaply. The Colorado Energy Office was set to get two separate $70 million awards for such work, records show, while the California Energy Commission would get $580 million for the same task and the New York energy institute more than $310 million.

The weatherization of low-income households began with the Obama administration’s 2009 spending bill, and it got a big boost under President Biden. For example, two grants, for $70 million each, were earmarked for the Colorado Energy Office’s weatherization projects in fiscal year 2024, records show.

As with other stories RCI has done on Biden’s climate change spending, the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment. But current White House officials maintain that the grant binge ended during President Trump’s second term.

“While the Biden administration threw taxpayer dollars at Green New Scam ideological pet projects, the Trump administration is focused on reshoring critical supply chains and safeguarding our national and economic security – all while ensuring the best bargain for taxpayers in every deal,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told RCI.

The Colorado Energy Office declined comment, and NYSERDA did not respond to RCI’s questions about the grants.

The California Energy Commission, on the other hand, said much of the grant money was tied to formula spending, such as “clean energy retrofits” in residential homes.

“California is meeting growing electricity demand by rapidly building out affordable clean energy infrastructure, increasing grid resilience and transmission capacity, and electrifying new and existing buildings with energy efficient appliances that help lower energy bills,” a Commission spokesperson told RCI. “Federal grant funding is critical for California and other states to quickly meet growing energy demand and to do it in the smartest way possible – with clean renewable electricity.”

There was one FY2024 grant to the CEC specifically labeled as “formula;” however, an $11.7 million grant was fully disbursed by Treasury.

New Priorities

In the grand scheme of federal spending, the amounts may not seem huge. They are dwarfed, for instance, in comparison to the grants Washington has made for interstate highways.

“Biden wanted to jumpstart the green energy economy so it’s not surprising to me a couple of billion dollars were spent,” said John Joseph Wallis, an economics professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in public finance. “They just decided to make that a priority, and there are hundreds of examples of that kind of thing over the last century.”

But as the renewable energy grants began to flow, inspectors general at the Energy Department and the EPA warned the unprecedented amounts would make oversight next to impossible.

“The EPA’s inspector general Sean O’Donnell warned Congress that money would be lost to fraud and waste if the EPA went ahead with its plan to spend billions in Inflation Reduction Act funds in a short timeframe, but the money was funneled out anyway,” Portnoy said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has made several moves to reorient the Department toward Trump’s policy goal of increasing affordable and abundant energy, a shift the administration in a first-day executive order labeled “unleashing American energy,” and Wright’s Department calls the “Energy Dominance Financing Program.”

Over the past year and a half, the administration has slashed away at what it considers Biden’s fanciful push toward a Net Zero future. Within two months it had put together a so-called “kill list” of recent renewable energy initiatives, and last October, the administration canceled $7.6 billion in Biden-era energy grants, with White House budget director Russell Vought saying the money had been designed to “fuel the Left’s climate agenda.”

Wright told a House committee last month that politics were not behind cuts at Energy, but the February lawsuit insists that they were, pointing to the hit list drawn up by the Department in 2025. “The list was intended to further the Administration’s goal of eliminating renewable-energy programs created by Congress through the duly-enacted 2021 IIJA and the 2022 IRA – programs the Administration derisively calls the ‘Green New Scam,'” the lawsuit alleged. It’s not clear how many of the grants that were approved in Biden’s final year are tied to that lawsuit, although the California Energy Commission said its major grants are not.

The suit makes various arguments as to why this money should still be spent. Chief among them is that the money flows out of statutes duly passed by Congress and signed by the president. And in some cases it also says that without these huge infusions of federal funds, some states will not be able to hit ambitious targets they set to combat global warming.

Leftist environmental groups have calculated the difference between the closure of renewable energy projects in the Biden and Trump administrations, according to a New York Times column in May. Their figures show Biden “canceled, closed or downsized” 25 such projects worth $3.5 billion in 2023 and 2024, while last year, Trump’s first back in office, saw 61 such projects crimped or shuttered with a value of $34.76 billion.

But Larry Behrens, spokesman for the conservative Power The Future energy advocacy group, said there is no reason taxpayers should finance coastal states’ efforts to shift their economies from traditional energy sources to renewables.

“Working families in Louisiana, Florida, or Ohio should not be forced to bankroll the out-of-touch climate goals for politicians in New York, California, or Illinois,” he said. “Every one of these grants should be scrutinized for fraud so taxpayers will stop being treated like an unlimited ATM for the green agenda.”