WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump could soon move to cancel more than $1 billion in federal grants for General Motors Co. and Stellantis NV and $800 million total in Michigan, according to a Trump administration planning document obtained by The Detroit News.
The largest Michigan grant in question is a $500 million award for GM to convert its Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant from producing internal combustion engine cars to producing EVs. The other Michigan grant awardees on the list include Dow Chemical Co., Ford Motor Co., auto supplier Robert Bosch LLC and more.
The document also lists over $16 billion worth of Department of Energy projects targeted for cancellation across more than a dozen other states. It has circulated on Capitol Hill after being provided to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The list’s emergence comes amid a political stalemate over health care policy that resulted in the federal government shutdown. Trump has blamed Democrats for the shutdown and threatened to eliminate programs favored by the party if the stalemate persists, though there was already dwindling likelihood that the automotive projects in question would materialize.
Several of the grants in question were meant to provide funds to retool manufacturing facilities in Michigan, Indiana and Illinois for the eventual production of electric vehicles. Former President Joe Biden awarded the grants in July 2024, but they had not yet been finalized under a Trump administration set on removing federal support for EVs.
The General Motors grant — a $500 million award to convert its Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant from producing internal combustion engine cars to producing EVs — was already a target of Vice President JD Vance while he was on the campaign trail last year.
He suggested the funds would prop up China’s auto industry, which has become a world leader in producing EVs and processing the raw components needed to manufacture them elsewhere.
“I think there’s certainly a role — and I believe this and I know Donald Trump believes this — in encouraging innovation,” Vance said of the project at an Oct. 2, 2024, campaign event. “But there’s a difference between promoting innovations and sending hundreds of billions of dollars to favored industries that make their products in China. These are two very, very different things.”
Days later, Vance again criticized the grant while campaigning in Michigan. He said the funds were “table scraps” compared to the potential job losses he predicted would happen under Biden-era EV policies.
The GM grant was projected to support the retention of more than 650 jobs and create 50 new ones, according to a description released by the Biden administration upon the announcement of project awards. The company declined to comment for this story.
One of the Stellantis projects had already been scrapped months ago, local officials and union leaders in Belvidere, Illinois, told The Detroit News. Stellantis had been set to receive $335 million from the federal government for EV production at a currently idled facility, but the company announced plans in March to build Ram midsize pickups there by 2027 instead.
The other Stellantis project would send $250 million to retool the company’s Indiana Transmission Plant in Kokomo for production of electric drive modules. The automaker declined to comment for this story.
Republicans in Washington have been slashing federal support for EVs for months. The Trump administration and GOP lawmakers, via a June resolution, revoked California’s permission to set influential state-level EV sales requirements. The next month, they zeroed out penalties on automakers for violating the Department of Transportation’s fuel economy standards and ended federal tax credits for EVs via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Trump has vowed to go further amid the shutdown stalemate.
“We have a lot of things that we’re going to eliminate,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Because of the shutdown, which I think they made a big mistake, we’re able to take out billions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse.”
Other EV-related projects on the list include $95 million to Dow for producing electrolyte solvents required in lithium-ion battery production, a $285 million grant to Mercedes-Benz to shift its van production operations in South Carolina from internal combustion engines to electric powertrains and $75 million to Cummins Inc. to transition a 98-year-old plant in Columbus, Indiana, from producing diesel engines to electrified components.
The other Michigan grants on the list include approximately $28 million to Ford for work on a “high energy fuel cell application” for medium-duty trucks, $30 million for Bosch for a fuel cell industrialization project and $32 million to LuxWall Inc. to construct vacuum-insulated glass, among others.
Department of Energy Press Secretary Ben Dietderich, asked specifically about the GM and Stellantis grants, provided an emailed statement.
“It is incorrect to suggest that award has been terminated. As Secretary Wright made clear last week, the Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration. No determinations have been made other than what has been previously announced,” he said.
The statement continued: “Rest assured, the Department is hard at work to deliver on President Trump’s promise to restore affordable, reliable, and secure energy to the American people.”
The Energy Department did not respond to a follow-up inquiry about the larger list.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.