On October 20, 2026, the Department of Energy announced approximately $967 million in additional funding through the Grid Resilience State and Tribal Formula Grant program, directed to states, territories, and tribes for locally driven hardening and modernization projects. The release names no states, lists no projects, and gives no timeline beyond the announcement itself. That absence of detail is not an oversight. It is the defining feature of formula grants: the federal government allocates the money by formula, and the recipients — state energy offices, territorial agencies, tribal governments — decide what to build.
It is also, by the arithmetic, the final round. The program was authorized by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law at $2.3 billion over five years. DOE had awarded roughly $1.3 billion through fiscal year 2024, about $815 million in the first two cycles and roughly $474 million in the FY2024 round announced in October 2024. Add the $967 million announced this week and the program sits at approximately $2.27 billion — effectively the whole authorization, spent in five cycles. This is not a new program or an expanded one. It is the last scheduled payout of the one Congress created in 2021.
That makes it the right moment to take the formula approach seriously, and to read the new administration’s framing of it with the same skepticism this desk applies to every announcement. The press release wraps a five-year-old Biden-era resilience program in Trump-era “energy dominance” language about lowering electricity costs. The dollars are the same dollars Congress authorized in 2021. The question is whether the same dollars buy different things when the framing changes — and whether that matters for the wires.
Formula money is not competitive money
Most of what this desk has covered this month — the $1.9 billion federal share of SPARK reconductoring announced September 24, the restated $250 million TVA award announced October 13 — lives in the competitive track. In competitive programs, DOE selects projects: utilities and coalitions submit proposals, the department picks winners, and the parties negotiate toward executed agreements. The announcements that result carry project lists, capacity estimates, and federal cost-shares, and they carry the selection-stage contingencies this publication keeps underlining. SPARK’s 31 projects are expected to reach formal agreements between October 2026 and January 2027. The TVA GRIP package was first selected in October 2024 and, as far as the public record shows, remains unexecuted two years later.
Formula grants run on different machinery, and the differences matter. Eligibility is set by statute and formula, not by application merit. The formula weighs population, land area, the likelihood and severity of disruptive events such as wildfires and severe storms, and what a locality has historically spent on mitigation. Every state, territory, and eligible tribe gets an allocation whether or not it submitted the shiniest proposal. The October 20 announcement does not pick winners because there are no winners to pick: it posts allocations on FedConnect under funding opportunity DE-FOA-0002736 and opens a 120-day application window — deadline February 17, 2027 — for existing recipients and new applicants to claim their shares. This round bundles the FY2025 and FY2026 cycles in a single amendment — a catch-up, moving the program’s last two cycles out the door together.
Then the federal step is done and the local step begins. States and tribes sub-award the money to eligible entities — utilities, cooperatives, municipal systems — for projects those entities choose within the program’s resilience purposes. The average check is small by transmission standards. The FY2024 round moved about $474 million across 49 states, five territories, 254 tribal nations, and the District of Columbia, and the projects it funded were correspondingly local: the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in Oklahoma used about $1.7 million to install nearly 1.7 miles of new underground line; the town of Estes Park, Colorado secured about $700,000 for its first battery storage system and the future development of a microgrid. These are distribution-scale projects. They do not appear in DOE press releases with gigawatt figures attached, because they are measured in miles of conductor replaced and hours of outage avoided.
Why boring money works
There is an honest case for the formula approach that has nothing to do with ribbon-cuttings. It rests on a simple observation about who knows where the grid is weak. DOE, sitting in Washington, cannot tell you which feeder in Kansas floods, which distribution pole sets in Michigan are past their structural life, or which tribal community loses power every wildfire season. State energy offices, cooperatives, and tribal utilities know these things intimately, because they take the outage calls. Formula money trusts local knowledge over federal selection panels.
The second virtue is speed of a different kind. Competitive programs are fast on headlines and slow on wire: selection in 2024, negotiation into 2026 or 2027, construction years later. Formula rounds have their own friction — applications, sub-award processes, environmental reviews — but the project decisions are made closer to the ground, by recipients who already have capital plans and contractor relationships. A state energy office that has been running sub-awards since FY2022 does not need to be convinced the money is real; it needs to file the paperwork.
The third virtue is the cost structure. Resilience work is overwhelmingly labor and local materials: poles, wire, vegetation management, undergrounding, protective devices, storage. These projects spend in local labor markets and complete in months, not permitting cycles. The institutional overhead that makes large transmission take a decade simply does not attach to small local hardening.
The fourth is equity in the original, unfashionable sense of the word: every eligible recipient gets a share, including communities that have never once won a competitive federal grant. Two hundred fifty-four tribal nations in the last round. Territories with island grids whose failure modes are hurricanes, not congestion. The formula’s inputs — event likelihood, historical mitigation spending — tilt the money toward places that have been hit hard and have had the least to spend on themselves. That is a deliberate design choice from 2021, and it survives intact in this round whether or not anyone says the word Justice40.
What the new framing does — and what it might change
The October 20 release is wrapped in the administration’s standard cost language. Secretary Chris Wright’s statement pairs “lowering costs” with “unleashing prosperity” as “top priorities for President Trump.” The release says the funding will “help lower costs for American families and businesses,” and Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza’s statement promises “technologies that can lower the long-term cost of delivering reliable power.” The program’s FY2024 announcement, by contrast, talked about extreme weather, clean affordable power, and community benefit, under the banner of the Investing in America agenda.
So the same $2.3 billion authorization has now been announced in two dialects. The honest reading is that resilience spending lowers costs only in a specific, second-order sense. A hardened feeder does not cut a ratepayer’s bill the way a cheaper kilowatt-hour does. What it cuts is the cost of outages — lost business hours, spoiled inventory, emergency repairs, deferred maintenance that compounds into failures. Outage avoidance is real economic value; utilities have long quantified it in SAIDI and SAIFI terms, and avoided storm damage is the benefit case under which most of these projects were justified. But it is not bill relief in any sense a household would recognize, and the release should be read with that distinction in mind.
The sharper question is whether the framing shift changes project selection at the recipient level. The program’s statutory purposes did not change: resilience against disruptive events, system performance, reliable power. But DOE’s current program guidance, per reporting on the amendment, emphasizes projects that deliver affordable, reliable power. Prior rounds prioritized community benefit and, under the previous administration, disadvantaged-community outcomes. Whether state energy offices now steer the money differently — fewer microgrids and batteries, more conventional hardening; less attention to the communities the formula’s equity tilt was built for — is the kind of change that will not show up in any press release. It will show up in the sub-award lists, once states file them over the winter and into spring.
The accountability problem that never went away
Formula money’s virtue is also its vulnerability: diffuse accountability. The competitive track’s announcements are selection-stage, but at least the selections are public, with project lists to check against delivery. The formula track has no central project list at all. The projects exist in state energy office dockets, tribal sub-award records, and utility filings across more than 300 recipients. Tracking the $967 million from announcement to energized hardware means following 50-plus grantees, each running its own sub-award process on its own timeline.
The previous rounds are, in this respect, still unresolved. DOE announced the FY2024 round two years ago; recipients are, per DOE’s own telling, still identifying and sub-awarding specific projects. The program distributes money and trusts the recipients to spend it; what gets built, and whether it performs, is visible only to those who read the state dockets. For a publication that measures announcements against delivery, the formula program is the hardest thing on the grid to audit — and the one whose actual impact is most dispersed and therefore most under-reported.
There is a related scale question. At roughly $474 million across more than 300 grantees last round, and $967 million this round covering two cycles, the average grantee allocation remains modest. A state that receives a few million dollars funds a handful of feeder upgrades. None of these projects, individually, moves a reliability metric at the bulk-system level. The program’s theory is that thousands of local hardening projects aggregate into a materially more resilient distribution system. That theory is plausible but essentially untested at the program level — no one has measured the portfolio outcome against the 2.3 gigawatt-scale capacity numbers that competitive programs love to publish, because formula grants were never meant to produce numbers like that.
Where it touches the load-growth story — and where it does not
Because every grid announcement in 2026 gets read through the data-center lens, the connection deserves precision. The formula program does not add transfer capacity. It does not reconductor corridors, unclog interconnection queues, or build substations for large loads. It hardens distribution systems against storms and outages. For a data center, that matters at the margin: a site served by a storm-hardened feeder with a nearby microgrid is a more reliable site. But the program’s checks are too small and too diffuse to change the load-growth adequacy math. SPARK’s 23 gigawatts of estimated transfer capability is the capacity story this month. The formula grants are the resilience story. Conflating them would be a mistake.
There is, however, an indirect connection worth noting. As load grows and electrification deepens, every outage costs more — more customers interrupted per event, more economic activity on the other side of each failed feeder. The marginal value of resilience spending rises with load growth even if the spending itself does not grow. The $967 million buys roughly the same kind of projects as the FY2024 round bought, but each avoided outage hour is worth more in a 2026 economy than the equivalent hour was in 2022.
What to watch
The standard this desk applies to every announcement — names, numbers, hardware — adapts here into a different watchlist. For the formula program, four things.
First, the allocation tables. DOE posted allocations and application instructions on FedConnect under DE-FOA-0002736. The distribution — which states get what, which tribal nations claim first-time applicant status — is public data, and the equity tilt of the formula should be legible in it.
Second, the February 17, 2027 application deadline. The 120-day window opened October 20; the interesting signal is uptake. The FY2024 round reached 49 states — one short of the full set, with the District of Columbia also participating. Whether every eligible recipient claims its share this round, and whether any state sits out again, is the first test of the program’s reach.
Third, the sub-award lists, emerging through the winter and spring as state energy offices assemble project slates. This is where the framing question gets answered: whether project types shift away from the storage-and-microgrid mix of earlier rounds toward conventional hardening, and whether the community-benefit emphasis of the Biden-era rounds survives under the affordability language of this one.
Fourth, the completion record of the earlier rounds. Roughly $1.3 billion has been announced and partially sub-awarded since FY2022, and the public account of what it built remains scattered across state dockets. Before the final $967 million round is judged, the first $1.3 billion deserves a reckoning: the projects built, the outages avoided, the money that actually reached the pole.
The program’s supporters call formula grants the quiet workhorse of federal grid spending, and the description fits. The money is steady, local, and boring, and boring is a virtue when the alternative is a selection-stage announcement restated two years later with the agreements still unsigned. But quiet money still needs someone to watch where it goes. The $967 million announced October 20 will either become wire in the ground or line items in state reports. The difference, as always, is in the dockets.