Employment in the sector dipped in Donald Trump’s first year back in office — and many more expected jobs won’t materialize thanks to canceled clean energy projects.
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Clean energy installations have persisted at record levels despite President Donald Trump’s best efforts to stop them. But the first year of Trump’s second term did leave a mark on U.S. jobs in the sector.
Clean energy jobs fell in 2025 after four years of steady growth, according to a new analysis of federal jobs data by business-focused environmental advocacy group E2. The U.S. had 3.52 million clean energy jobs at the end of 2025, down nearly 37,000 from the year before. That drop represents just about 1% of the clean energy workforce, but was enough to erase about 40% of the previous year’s job growth.
The big caveat is that overall energy employment also fell between 2024 and 2025. The clean energy job losses closely track clean energy’s share of overall energy jobs, suggesting that the drop, while a substantial break from the previous four years, might have more to do with broader energy sector trends than the unique challenges facing clean energy.
It’s been hard to say definitively how well clean energy has fared under the current administration; federal policy has turned against renewables and electric vehicles again and again, yet raw clean energy deployment numbers have continued their dominant streak from the Biden years. Solar is the No. 1 pick for new power plants getting built in America, followed by batteries and wind. Factories have continued to open, reshoring production of batteries, solar panels, and even cells.
But clean energy employers have had to adjust to new policy obstacles and prepare for a less certain future. Halfway through 2025, the Republican majority in Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, stripping away renewable energy tax credits that were supposed to run for roughly another decade, plus consumer-facing incentives to help Americans electrify their cars and homes. The executive branch also froze or clawed back billions of dollars earmarked by Congress to fund efficiency and clean energy installations for communities.
There are many variables at play here, but the job changes do track with the areas targeted by federal policy.
The One Big Beautiful Bill ended the EV tax credit first, in September 2025. U.S. automakers subsequently backed away from their earlier EV plans, shuttering planned and operating production lines and reorienting battery manufacturing to make grid storage products. Clean vehicles lost the most jobs in relative terms compared to the other clean energy categories — 2.4% or 9,619.
Energy efficiency, hit hard by the funding clawbacks, lost the most in absolute terms — 21,443 — though that is less than 1% of the sub-sector’s nearly 2.4 million jobs. “Storage and grid modernization” provided the brightest spot in the report, growing by 3.2%; grid batteries retained their tax credits in the budget law, and have continued to enjoy bipartisan support.
What this data doesn’t represent is the many planned jobs that will never come to fruition due to the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy. Companies canceled or downsized nearly 150 clean energy manufacturing, generation, and storage projects in 2025, E2 says — projects that were expected to create nearly 85,000 new jobs.
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Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.